The Dead Presidents Club: Hitting It Dead-On
Austin Playhouse, through June 22
Running Time: 1 hr, 30 min
What if there were a place where our country’s most controversial leaders gathered to be held up to genuine moral scrutiny? What if in this place they had to answer to an authority more powerful than that of the fickle public, the partisan-torn Senate or the ratings-hungry media? And, what’s more, what if the presidents who were called there were some of the most morally ambiguous in our nation’s history?
This is the juicy idea behind The Dead Presidents Club, by Larry L. King. In a post-existence barracks, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon are detained and scrutinized by a delegation of prissy saints charged with determining their eternal fate. The play’s straightforward premise allows for lighthearted exploration of the strengths and foibles of each of these diverse national characters, played with inspiration by an excellent team of actors. The show’s conflicts and complications make for a funny, entertaining, mildly educational evening of theatre.
The best part of Austin Playhouse’s revival of this comedy (which it premiered in 1996) is the performances. Through good casting and great craft, not only do the actors fully embody the most recognizable personality traits of each president, they also look stunningly like the men they are portraying. Michael Hankin inhabits the reticence and dry humor of history’s “Silent Cal,” the president known for his questionable motto, “Leave well enough alone.” Tom Parker’s Harry Truman is forthright to the point of self-righteousness, just like the real “Give ‘Em Hell Harry,” and looks astonishingly like the original. But even more laudable are Michael Stuart as LBJ and David Stahl as Nixon. Stuart is uncanny in his ability to channel Johnson’s swagger and silver-tongued charm as he wheedles his way through the afterlife. Stuart, whose face looks nothing like Johnson’s, manages somehow to capture LBJ’s expressions, from his sardonic smile to his furrowed brow. Stahl’s Nixon, on the other hand, is not as direct an imitation. Yet the actor seems to out-Nixon Nixon in his depiction of the leader’s profound insecurities. Nixon’s paranoid, racist, dissembling nature takes on humorous yet human pathos in Stahl. His stooped, sweaty portrayal makes Nixon seem pitiable, which lends the former president a satisfying moral ambivalence in a play that questions each man’s greatest good.
The most significant detraction from the strengths of this production is its staging by director Don Toner, which at times inhibited my ability to enjoy the show and shortchanged the excellent actors. Throughout the piece, but especially in the climactic scene, the four presidents are often positioned in such a way that their faces are invisible to a large section of the audience. While I could hear most of what was said, I felt cheated out of seeing the expressions and gestures that these men obviously poured a great deal of work into. Nevertheless, the play is effective overall as a playful examination of how the good ends one man achieves in his lifetime measure up to the destruction inherent in his means.
This article appears in June 13 • 2003.