Real-life figures

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Hornby, Richard

THE FIRST KNOWN PLAY TO USE ACTUAL HISTORIC PERSONAGES was Aeschylus' The Persians, whose cast includes the Persian King Darius (whom the Greeks had just defeated at Salamis, in 480 B.C.), plus his mother and the ghost of his father. Of course, the Greeks considered the characters in all their myths and plays, like Oedipus or Agamemnon or Clytemnestra, to be real historic figures too, but they were part of ancient history, from the misty time of the Trojan War, a thousand years earlier. Darius was still alive when Aeschylus wrote about him. Did he know that one of his enemies put him into a play? And what a strange experience for the Athenian audience, watching a play about their recent foe that actually treats him sympathetically. When a real-life figure is dramatized, the results are a strange doubleness; the audience may be drawn in by the drama, but they are simultaneously estranged because of their knowledge and experience of the actual person depicted. The character in the play both is and is not the person they know about.

American playwrights have rarely used characters from our national past, whether recent or old. John Guare's latest play, A Few Stout Individuals, produced by the Signature Theatre Company in New York, is an exception. Its protagonists are Ulysses S. Grant and his friend Mark Twain, who encouraged the general to write his memoirs, then edited, published, and marketed them. Twain had originally spotted Grant's writing talent, admiring the plain, strong, lucid prose style in his letters, but Grant resisted until, broke and dying of throat cancer, he realized that the memoirs were the only way he could provide for his family.

A Few is a typical Guare piece, meandering all over the place, mixing fact with fantasy, enactment with direct address to the audience, and tightly written scenes with free association. Its effectiveness is the result of its fresh take on Twain, whom we think of as a comic writer and lecturer rather than as an editor and publisher in a ruthless business, just as we think of Grant as a soldier and (alas) a failed President rather than as a major American author. Twain actually hired Civil War veterans to market the book-going door-to-door asking if anyone inside was a former soldier!-a cynical scheme worthy of the twenty-first century. The play points up interesting parallels between the two friends: Both had children who turned out to be wastrels. Both lost a lot of money through bad investments, Twain with a typesetting machine with an incurable tendency to break down, Grant via his son's crooked business partner. And, of course, both were writers.

At the beginning of the play, the book project is in chaos. The Grants' Manhattan apartment has become a dingy ghost of its former self, with bare rectangles on the discolored walls echoing the paintings that have been sold to pay off debts. Grant, doped up on morphine, cocaine, and intravenous brandy, can barely speak, let alone write. The book is only partly finished, and some of it is questionable; Grant's wife may have concocted her own sanitized version, in a flowery prose nothing like the general's clear, unaffected style. Twain, heavily in debt himself, is desperate to get Grant to finish the two-volume book, but the task seems hopeless. One of Grant's servants even plans to spirit the old man off to Nantucket to die, thus creating a tourist attraction there.

Grant chats with the Emperor of Japan, in a drug-induced hallucination, but one based on actual experience. Grant and his wife had gone around the world after his presidency, and had been much impressed by Japan, newly opened to Westerners. The Japanese were equally impressed with Grant; they actually created a kabuki play' loosely based on his exploits in the Civil War but set in medieval Japan, ending with seventy dancing geishas in stars-and-stripes kimonos. Grant recalls his meeting with the Emperor as the high point of his life-a summit, according to the Emperor, of the two most powerful men in the world.

Thus far, A Few seems on the verge of becoming a first-rate play, with fresh interpretations of historic figures, weird but historically justified juxtapositions, and strong conflict. But then, that maddening indifference to dramatic structure that is so prevalent among American playwrights removes all the steam from the piece. Guare fails to follow up on the dramatic implications of the material, instead tossing in episodes at random. A servant provides a description of the Battle of Cold Harbor, one of Grant's greatest failures. Twain in interludes addresses the audience directly, on Huckleberry Finn, the typesetting machine, and the death of his son in all its details. The opera singer Adelina Patti wanders in, announcing that she will dedicate "her next farewell performance" to Grant. Worst of all, Grant's pulling himself together to finish the memoir while in great pain, completing it only days before his death, is merely described rather than shown.

Typically, playwrights simplify or otherwise alter historical facts to make their plays more dramatic, but Guare's choices in this regard often have the opposite effect. The kabuki play on Grant's life could have provided focus and style for A Few Stout Individuals, as in the underrated Sondheim musical, Pacific Overtures, where the kabuki theatre becomes the medium by which the nineteenth-century Japanese view the intrusive Americans, and hence the medium by which we in turn view the Japanese. Instead, Guare treats the kabuki play on Grant's life perfunctorily, not even noting the fact that the Grants attended the premiere. The details of the event are so colorful and telling, one wonders how any playwright could leave them out: It was so hot that the theater manager filled the auditorium with blocks of ice and served the Grants ice cream, both really exotic items. To thank him, Grant later presented the theater with a curtain.