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Also this issue: 25 Alive Strange New World Rock Out Philling the Gaps A View to a Quilt |
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July 18-24, 2002
theater
Camping with Henry and TomThrough July 28, People's Light & Theatre Co., 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500
As if contemporary politicians and corporate tycoons weren’t annoying enough to listen to, this play makes us sit through two hours of aggravating dialogue by politicians and corporate tycoons of the past. Why playwright Mark St. Germain chose to subject us to this unpleasantness -- unless it’s to make us grateful that Henry Ford didn’t become the 30th president of the United States -- is unclear. If we still need to be told that inventions, like the automobile and the electric light, don’t always improve the quality of human life, although they might make it easier, we haven’t been paying attention to the energy crisis.
The time: 1921. The place: the woods. The characters: President Warren Harding, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. The situation: Edison and Ford, who, historically, went on an annual camping trip, invite Harding to accompany them. They are, predictably, beset by media types, and so attempt to escape from the crowds of photographers, reporters, Secret Service agents, as well as the rest of the entourage of chefs, porters and whomever. The dramatic setup: A crash wrecks the Model T, wounds a deer and strands the three men, who then have to talk to one another until they are found and rescued.
Edison is old and cranky and, although he is deaf, seems to hear everything. Harding is a genial fool. Ford is a windbag with fascistic ambitions. The hidden agenda is that Ford wants Harding to force the government to sell him the Tennessee Valley, threatening to expose Harding's affair with a young woman who has had his baby. Harding suddenly realizes that this will solve all his problems: He can escape the presidency, which he never wanted in the first place; his wife, whom he never wanted in the first place, will leave him; and he can relax. When Ford outlines his plans to replace Harding as the next president, starting with the elimination of the Jews and working on down to rewriting school texts, Edison finally threatens to expose his peccadilloes.
Edison isn't a nice man, but at least he's smart enough to know his limitations: "We're toymakers, Henry." There is some political blather about democracy being the system that guarantees we get neither the best nor the worst (let's hear it for mediocrity: Now there is an idea we can all get behind), and some philosophic blather about machines but not men being fixable.
Camping with Henry and Tom gives us the chance to see three really good actors, Graham Smith, Mark Lazar and Peter DeLaurier, make the best they can of a really tedious play. Stephen Novelli directs.
