Camp pain

Foothills masters St. Germain's dopey historical drama

by Steve Vineberg

By Mark St. Germain. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Set designed by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Joe Saint. With David Bailey, Edwin J. McDonough, Michael Walker, and Bob Dolan. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, Worcester, through November 21.

Camping with Henry and Tom receives a handsome production at Foothills under Daniel Gidron's direction. And the visual pleasures of Janie E. Howland's whimsical, stylized forest set -- the best, I think, that I've seen at this theater -- and Joe Saint's blue-tinted lighting, mysterious yet becalmed, delay the recognition that Mark St. Germain's play is a fairly dopey slice of historical drama. This piece was suggested by a little-known incident in the brief presidency of Warren G. Harding (who died in his third year in office): Harding, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison were stranded overnight in the Maryland woods in 1921. It's a funny premise for a play -- something Tom Stoppard might have seized on -- but despite the sardonic wisecracking of the impatient, misanthropic Edison, St. Germain doesn't intend this to be a comedy. This is history as civics lesson. The sinking feeling I got when I realized what he was up to was familiar to me from my experiences at such square-jawed repertory stalwarts as Inherit the Wind and The Diary of Anne Frank.

In St. Germain's scheme, Harding (played by Michael Walker, the new artistic director at Foothills) is a somewhat wayward but definitely good-hearted man who has arrived at the twin conclusions that he shouldn't have married and he shouldn't have run for the presidency. His acknowledgment of his own shortcomings and his essential sweetness are meant to distinguish him from Ford (David Bailey), whose private investigators have amassed enough dirt on Harding's enthusiastic extramarital life to put him in a position of power over the president. What Ford appears to want is first dibs at a government-owned property, which he intends to maneuver out of Harding at a farcically low price so he can turn it into a factory. But what he's really after, we learn, is Harding's job. In the second act, Ford unearths his scheme for rising to power as well as a nuthouse brand of anti-Semitism that he plans to use as his platform in the next election.

This may be the only play ever written in defense of Harding, whom St. Germain posits as a counter to Ford's barbarianism. Ford's meanness has been well documented (yes, he was a Jew hater, and he so despised labor unions that he hired stooges to gun down striking auto workers), but St. Germain doesn't present him plausibly. His gruff, profane demeanor seems at first a kind of plainspokenness, but St. Germain's plan is to make us warm to him at first and then strip away his reasonableness, and, when he does, the effect is of a playwright who's just dying to shoot arrows into a character he doesn't like. So you think he's a nice guy and that Harding's a weakling? Well now, what would you like it if I told you that Henry Ford is nothing but a slimy blackmailer? And a fanatical anti-Semite? And just as adulterous as the man he's threatening with scandal? And a coward who doesn't even have the stones to perform euthanasia on the deer he crippled with his precious automobile? (It's that collision that causes Ford's car to break down in the woods in the first place and strands this unlikely trio -- whose outing in each other's company is never satisfactorily explained.) And that damned offstage deer is the worst kind of dramatic convenience: having employed it to point out Ford's timorousness on the one hand, St. Germain suddenly reduces the agony of its injuries to show us Harding's pure love of animals and the chilly, death's-head efficiency of the secret service man (Bob Dolan) who shoots the deer the next morning without a second's hesitation.

The third member of the camping ensemble, Thomas Edison (Edwin J. McDonough), seems at first to be along just for entertainment. Ornery Edison has the best lines, and McDonough, a skillful actor, attacks them with panache, delivering in the process the best performance of the evening. (He's also the only one of the three I found fully convincing as the celebrity he was impersonating.) But Edison, whom Ford counts on to support both his efforts to unseat Harding and his political aspirations, turns out to be St. Germain's pivot -- a man who finds his humanity and so, of course, ends up declaring his allegiance to the flawed but humane Harding. And nowhere does the triteness of the playwright's dramatic ideas show itself more clearly than in his treatment of this character. In act one Edison tells the story of a boyhood friend he saw drowned, an incident that's meant to signal his heartlessness because he neither reported it nor has ever been able to remember the boy's name. In act two, having renounced Ford in favor of Harding, he's finally able to recall that name. Can we call it a case of recovered dramaturgy?