Blacklist Blues

by Sam Adams

theater

Arguably the most talented of the Hollywood Ten, the group of screenwriters and directors who did time for defying the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Dalton Trumbo is easy to admire, but difficult to like. As self-righteous as he was principled, Trumbo had a way of rubbing even people who agreed with him the wrong way; no matter what you think of HUAC, it's hard to countenance Trumbo's screamed insistence that the hearings marked "the beginning of an American concentration camp," especially in the shadow of Japanese-American internment.

Trumbo, largely a one-man show constructed from Trumbo's letters to friends and family (as well as a gouging electrical contractor), doesn't so much show the man behind the myth as interweave the two. Trumbo's public statements are here, from his 1947 HUAC testimony to his 1970 Writers' Guild acceptance speech, in which he made the controversial declaration that in the story of the blacklist, there were "no villains or heroes only victims." But so are the private letters which reveal Trumbo's public bluster to be part of a general orneriness, sometimes good-natured, sometimes not.

Christopher Trumbo, who first assembled Trumbo for a benefit performance in 1998, says he wanted to "personalize" his father's story, "and give it a context that wasn't historical or legalistic." For Philadelphia Theater Company's production, TV clips provide context, while the narrator, played by William Zielinski, navigates between scenes. But the focus is mainly on Trumbo, played here by Bill Irwin in a role that has been essayed by actors as various as Steve Martin and Brian Dennehy.

"I've always felt that anyone can play this, and should," Trumbo says. "No one is trying to do an imitation of my father. I like the idea of the emphasis being on the text, so the audience doesn't feel like they're being drawn into a fictional world. The original conception was that this was an oratorio rather than an opera. The music is there; you just don't have the swordfights."

Trumbo, Oct. 8-Nov. 7, $30-$45, Plays & Players Theater, 1714 Delancey St., 215-985-0420.