Gore Vidal | The Best Man / 2012

the compromise

by Douglas Messerli

Gore Vidal The Best Man / New York, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, the performance I saw was a matinee on May 5, 2012

 

The Best Man is a play of political demands, subterfuge, lies, blackmail, and, most importantly, compromise—although the hero of Vidal’s witty political parable, William Russell (John Larroquette), refuses compromise with his arch-enemy, Joe Cantwell (Eric McCormack) or with his own conscience, and in that respect both Cantwell and the out-going President Arthur Hockstader (James Earl Jones) are correct in insisting that Russell is not a political beast!

     The compromise that Russell makes is a rare one for any political contender, sacrificing his own career and his political battle for power for moral victory and, possibly, a reaffirmation of his relationship with his wife.

      In this star-studded revival of Gore Vidal’s 1960 comic-drama Candice Bergan, Kerry Butler, Angela Lansbury, and Jefferson Mays together with Larroquette, McCormack and Jones, act up a storm, somewhat cloaking the fact that, for all its noise and hoopla (the sound of booming applause of convention goers and cackling reporters being broadcast through the theater’s sound system even during intermissions) the play is really a series of drawing-room comedic skits of wit and bluff.

     Like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the revival of which I witnessed a night earlier, The Best Man encapsulates, moreover, a vision of a world that no longer exists: the whirl of backroom politics, where decisions for party nominations were played out in convention hotel suites, votes bought and sold through a series of brokerings based on individual reputations smeared with lies, rumor, scandal, and partial truths.

     If, given today’s preordained presidential campaigns where all has been long-decided before the convention’s bland rhetorical flourishes and flag-waving remonstrations, we might feel superior to the nasty bloodbaths of earlier party gatherings, we might take note that, at least in Vidal’s fantasy, politics still mattered and the individual candidates, freed from appealing to the whole of the American populace, could at least imagine (even while recognizing the reality was something far different) that their personal values might matter.

     While Vidal remains, ultimately, cynical of that process—awarding the nomination to a “best man” whom neither of the leading candidates seem to have met and who know nothing of his values—both Russell and Cantwell, as different as they are, attempt to forge their campaigns based on very personal visions.

    Today elections are won more on “general” appeal—which one might describe as campaigns based on generalities and artful waffling as opposed to personal integrity and individual history. One need only note how current Republican candidate Romney attempts to cover over his own tracks regarding his Massachusetts support of health coverage and silence his family roots in Mexico—ancestors of his whom engaged in polygamy, or perceive Obama’s attempts to downplay his Indonesian childhood and diminish his real accomplishments on such issues as health care, currently unpopular with right-leaning independents and aspects of which may soon be overturned by the Supreme court.

     It is true that in Vidal’s play both major candidates have something to hide: Russell, his nervous breakdown and its attending medical history, as well as the subsequent failure of his marriage; Cantwell, his possible involvement in his young military days with a homosexual roommate. But, in real terms, it hardly matters whether the latter was involved in sexual acts or in merely squealing on his roommate, for in the context of the play either action  demonstrates his moral hypocrisy and his commitment to “the ends justifying the means.” Russell’s bout with mental exhaustion, it is clear, has little to do with his career, including in his more recent performance as Secretary of State, and, in reality, may simply indicate his inability to accept simple solutions to complex issues. And both men, despite their real and implicated blackmail, still stake their claims on their political careers and personal values reflected in their public service. While Cantwell’s politics are ruthless, opportunistic, and play directly to the ignorance of public perception, he is nevertheless a man of action, a true political beast who will clearly accomplish whatever he sets out to do. Despite Russell’s superior sense of ethics and his erudite comprehension of American and world history, he is, as his campaign advisor and the current President point out, a man who when faced with critical choices, wavers—or, to express it another way, is a man who stops to think before acting— a fatal flaw, evidently, for any leader.

     While one might be tempted to compare Vidal’s rivals with today’s presidential candidates, accordingly, Obama is no Russell, despite his intelligent projection of moral issues, just as Romney is no Cantwell, despite his obviously expedient shifts to the far right in order to appeal to those constituents. We live today in a time where everything is far more prepackaged and, consequently, morally blurred.

     The politics of Vidal’s parable, represented by the enormous compromise of candidate Russell, are no longer possible in our society of political and social extremes. As in the Miller play, I suspect, very few members of the audience under sixty—none of whom I spotted at the Schoenfeld matinee I attended—would be able to comprehend a drama so centered on one man’s moral scruples. When did morality and politics ever share the same bed? today’s voters might scoff. While in 1960 Vidal might have pointed to John Kennedy (even if mistakenly), today we have “hot mic” statements from our President admitting to Russian President Medvedev that during the election he needs the “flexibility” of not saying what he eventually might. And anyone reading the daily papers perceives that even expediently political compromises rarely occur in the chambers of congress. Morality today, apparently, often has little to do with a truly thought-out position. A man like Vidal’s Russell, sad to say, is either a political dinosaur or a literary fabrication at best. And a man of compromise, as Republic Senator Dick Lugar's defeat yesterday confirmed, is someone to be shunned.

 

New York, Minetta Tavern, May 6, 2012; Los Angeles, May 8, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).