Bobby, We Hardly Knew Ye

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the night he won the California Presidential primary in 1968. Running on an anti-war platform, he might very well have snatched the Democratic Presidential nomination from Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Having done that, he might have gone on to beat the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon — and, oh, how history might have been different!

In his new one-man play RFK, author-performer Jack Holmes explores the man behind the myth. After almost 40 years, a myth is more or less what Bobby Kennedy has become in the eyes of many. He was a legend in the making — the brother of the slain President, striving to bring us back to Camelot. But Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet left us with only the dream of his greatness.

Theatergoers who lived through those times will react to RFK far differently than those who did not. Twenty- and thirty-somethings will respond to the play as history while older people will respond to it as memory, and those are two very diffent things. (Scott’s mother wrote a condolence card to Bobby’s widow, Ethel, and received a silhouette of Bobby’s profile and a thank you note, both of which sat proudly framed in the family room for years. )

Either way you look at it, Holmes is a better actor than he is a playwright. Give him credit for presenting Bobby as a flawed human being, not a saint; but the writing merely skims the surface of the man. You’ll know more facts about Bobby at the end, but you won’t really have gotten inside him. Still, Holmes (the actor) does a magnificent job of evoking Bobby in look, voice, and gestures. You may or may not love the play, but you’ll sure want to vote for this guy,.

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By the Beautiful Seascape

Seascape begins on a sand dune by the ocean as a retired couple (played by George Grizzard and Frances Sternhagen) argue about how to spend their remaining years. He wants to enjoy the rest he’s earned, while she equates rest with death; she wants excitement and adventure. As in some other Edward Albee plays, a second couple arrives and shakes things up — but, in this case, they happen to be human-sized lizards (played by Frederick Weller and Elizabeth Marvel). Well, that shakes things up, all right!

Albee’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning play has been sumptuously remounted with applause-generating sets by Michael Yeargan and brilliant reptile costumes by Catherine Zuber. (Photos of those costumes were purposely withheld from the press.) The current production also feature four exquisite performances. All of this is in service to a multi-layered play that takes a quantum leap from domestic to cosmic issues and manages to connect the two via several million years’ worth of evolution. (No wonder Albee won a Pulitzer for Seascape.)

Just as the human couple wrestles with where to go and what to do with their lives, so does the lizard couple. That’s why they finally ventured onto land. They are two big, green metaphors representing that moment when sea creatures first ventured out of the primordial soup — except that they speak English, which is one of the play’s best jokes. This is, in fact, a very funny fantasy that also has the weight to make us consider our humanity and, perhaps, to treasure it a little bit more.

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Striking Oil

In its editing, Syriana is the most cinematic of movies you are likely to see this holiday season. The nominal stars are George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Jeffrey Wright, but the movie boasts a huge ensemble cast that features a slew of stage actors in addition to Wright — so it’s not surprising that it’s one of the best acted pictures of the year.

Syriana tells a complicated, multiple-point-of-view story about the relationship between big business, the U.S. government, and the oil-rich Middle East. Constructed like Traffic — it was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the screenplay for that film, and one of its executive producers is Stephen Soderbergh, who directed Traffic — we see the Middle East through the eyes of poor, radicalized Arabs, rich sheiks, CIA operatives, American government power brokers, and rich businessmen. And that’s just for starters. If there is a flaw in this otherwise smart, audacious, and polished film, it’s that there may simply be too many characters and too much plot for the average moviegoer to follow. The picture makes demands upon its viewers to pay sharp attention; it’s easy to miss an important plot point.

Perhaps that’s one reason why so many of the cast members come from the stage; they’ve each got to make an impact with very little screen time. Among the many stage vets in Syriana are Christopher Plummer, Amanda Peet, Jayne Atkinson, and Tim Blake Nelson. In fact, aside from Rent, perhaps the only other current film with so many stage actors in it is — believe it or not — the new Harry Potter movie. (How else do you think they make all that magic?)

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegels@theatermania.com.]