Telephoning Trumbo

The plight of a blacklisted '50s screenwriter regains currency in a new production.

by John Lombardi

At a time when the mayor of New York and his hard-nosed police chief can order the arrest of 1,800 relatively peaceful protesters because GOP leaders don't think they contribute telegenically to the message the Republican National Convention wants to get out; when the chief exporter of U.S. jobs via outsourcing can accuse his Democratic presidential rival of wanting to give American foreign policy away; and when worm-eating on primetime TV gets no guff from the FCC, while Janet Jackson's lubricious right breast invokes the fall of Western civ, it's good to see old Dalton Trumbo hit town.

Trumbo, a dramatized series of letters by the former '50s rebel jailbird and blacklisted screenwriter of Spartacus, Exodus, The Brave One and Roman Holiday (the latter starring those arch revolutionaries Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn), is artfully being read at Plays and Players on Delancey Street by the great Bill Irwin, the Tony Award-nominated mime/clown/actor, and by William Zielinski, a local guy best known for The Laramie Project at Philadelphia Theatre Company.

Trumbo, by Dalton's son Christopher, is a breath of lucid cool after the hot air of the presidential debates and the marathon blatting of TV political spots. Seeing it is like reading From Here to Eternity or The Man With the Golden Arm after a long diet of The Dark Tower and Harry Potter. We're sophisticated adults again.

"Dear Harry," federal prisoner 7551 wrote to a lunatic Screenwriters Guild officer who'd been bugging him for his unpaid dues (the House Un-American Activities Committee had seen to it that Trumbo went to jail for refusing to "cooperate," and couldn't work much when he got out). "I have received your letter ... I thought it rather loud and more than ordinarily witless, but to deny you those qualities would be to silence you altogether; and that, for constitutional reasons alone I should not like to see happen ... "

Dalton Trumbo, like John Huston, was a natural gentleman who nevertheless had to hustle for his dough, and so brought a raffish authenticity to popular art--something hard to imagine today, when --> --even smart TV dramas like Law & --> --Order test endings on primetime, to --> --see which ones the Levitra crowd --> --prefers. Trumbo unselfconsciously flexed --> --a retro macho, and yet was capable of --> --sensitive heartbreakers like The Brave --> --One, about a 12-year-old peasant kid --> --who saves a fighting bull he'd raised as --> --a calf from the horrors of the Mexico --> --City ring, without either the liquor-ish --> --bravado of Hemingway or the saccharine --> --schmaltz of Disney.

This uncategorizable writing runs against current trends, which tend to reduce all communication to the sales pitch, or the voiceless info-download, and it was this homo- genization that Bill Irwin agreed to discuss after I trapped him on his cell phone. (He was negotiating the West Side Highway on his approach to the George Washington Bridge, returning to Philly after a visit to his wife and kids.)

"I don't know why this has happened, and why there aren't more Trumbos around when we need 'em," Irwin said. "Wait, I've gotta do the S-thing to get on the lower level ...

"Maybe the cultural developmental stage we were at when Dalton was writing?--oops, 'Welcome to New Jersey'--I mean, he wasn't exactly a bookworm, was he? Though he'd decided to live his life in language. There was a kind of Woody Guthrie protest feeling going on in his work. And now we're so far from that ...

"One thing that's different is that Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee went after full-blown intellectuals and artists like Edward Dmytryk [a director], Albert Maltz [another writer], Ring Lardner Jr. and Trumbo [and got smeared in the end, even though they made the artists' lives miserable for a while as the Hollywood 10], and today they backed off after trying to mess with the NEA. The people they fool with now are unfortunately the poor, the ethnic and disenfranchised, who have no one to speak for them ... whereas Trumbo and the rest--as Chris' dramatization shows--would never shut up!"

"So you mean this oppressiveness has gotten as far as it has because the Republican right avoided high-profile targets?" I asked.

"Wait," he answered, and put the phone down because he'd missed the Jersey Turnpike cutoff. "Damn! Now I havta go all the way around ...

"Well, we can't know that ... But I've seen Actors' Equity and the Writers Guild step right up when anything even vaguely blacklisty threatens. Like when Tim Robbins was invited and then disinvited to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., for some opinion he'd expressed, or when the Dixie Chicks had part of their tour canceled because they'd been critical of the war ...

"What? Yes, I'm hopeful that the staging of this theater event, and the new Sam Shepard play [at the New School] are signs that people have had enough. I mean, when Gore lost to Bush, some of us just said, 'Well, two guys like that, what's the difference?' But now, after four years of a plan that simply seems unreasonable ... with all of those ruined young and old lives ... hell yes. And it's not just the arts community. Even real conservatives are fed up."

Trumbo
Through Nov. 7. $30-$45. Plays and Players Theater, 1714 Delancey Pl. 215.985.0420. www.phillytheatreco.com