Sitting at the dining table of his comfortable North Seattle home, Texas-raised playwright Robert Schenkkan and I are trying to establish—without resorting to Google—if Lyndon Baines Johnson died on the exact January day in 1973 that would’ve marked the end of his second term. (Had he run for that term, which he didn’t, as we see in The Great Society, reviewed here.) In fact Johnson died two days after Nixon’s second inaugural following four years of quiet retirement, a figure swiftly forgotten amid the turmoil of Watergate and Vietnam.
Back then, too young to have actually voted for Johnson (whom he met as a child), Schenkkan recalls how Johnson had been reduced to caricature—an uncouth Texan who lifted beagles by the ears and showed his surgery scars. “The country turned on him,” says Schenkkan, whose Bryan Cranston-starring All the Way earned a Tony for last year’s run on Broadway. (Here it alternates with The Great Society through January 4 at Seattle Repertory Theatre.) “He left under such a cloud. When people think about Johnson, the instinctual reaction is Vietnam, which was such a painful trial for the country. That animus got expressed in many unfortunate ways. It was so easy to mock the Southernisms. For a cartoonist, it was a field day—those jowls and those ears!”
It wasn’t always such. “Pre-1964, he was a great man. He was a liberal Democrat,”recalls Schenkkan, whose father dealt with LBJ while bringing public television to Austin. “We were big LBJ fans. The shock was this shockingly fast transformation from ’64 to ’66, ramping up in Vietnam—this steady leakage of information that Johnson had lied about the circumstances leading up to the war and the conduct of the war. And the country seemed to be tearing itself apart. It was a very painful time. There was a sea change in attitude toward Johnson.” That change is what we see in The Great Society, as the nation, Democratic Party, and LBJ himself come undone.
Though he immersed himself in the history of Johnson’s presidency, visited the Johnson library in Austin, and listened to LBJ’s voice in recorded speeches, Schenkkan is no historian. Instead, like so many dramatists before him, he’s borrowing an historical figure to explore timeless themes of “power and morality. And Johnson is such a fantastic lens to investigate these thematic concerns,” says Schenkkan. “How far can one go, should one go, in order to do good? LBJ as a dramatic character is so extraordinary. He’s truly Shakespearean.”
At the same time, his two plays seem overwhelmingly topical—one reason for the hunger I observed in the audience for a president who transcends gridlock, twists arms, makes deals, and gets things done! “The relevancy of LBJ to our current political situation is remarkable and overlooked,” says Schenkkan, who notes the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passage of which supplies the dramatic impetus for All the Way.
Still, Schenkkan didn’t foresee such timely import when he began the project six years ago. He explains, “I’ve come to this over time. Bill Rauch [of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival] approached me about this commission for the American Revolutions Project. The premise being, can American writers do with American history what Shakespeare did with Tudor history? By taking an individual or event out of our past to shed light on today and where we might be headed? I was the first writer they approached, and I said yes immediately. And I said LBJ. That was 2008. It was pre-Obama, well before the election.”
During the writing process, Schenkkan intentionally targeted All the Way’s Oregon premiere for the 2012 election year “as a really great time to re-examine Johnson.”As Obama’s election and re-election raised notions of racial progress and past legislative milestones, says Schenkkan, “I honestly hadn’t thought how we’d be hitting all these anniversaries. But that was providential.” (Speaking of timing, Schenkkan is now penning an HBO adaptation of All the Way, with Steven Spielberg producing and Cranston to star, set to air before the 2016 elections.)
All the Way depicts a political triumph, its sweeping action crammed into the eventful year following JFK’s assassination. Premiered earlier this year in Ashland (also under Rauch’s direction), The Great Society is “a tragedy,” says Schenkkan. “Whereas All the Way leads you up to a certain point . . . this [The Great Society] brings you full circle. And, I hope, to a clearer understanding of how we are the way we are today.”
Where we are today, post-midterms, is with a widely unpopular black president and a South flipped entirely to Republican control—just as Johnson predicts in All the Way. (Rueful laughter rippled through the audience following that line.) With Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover, Democratic segregationists, and Republican liberals variously contesting with or allying themselves (and sometimes both) with LBJ in his two plays, Schenkkan reminds us how “in ’64 both parties were big tents. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, had a large liberal wing and a very substantial center and a very sizable conservative wing. Party unity meant trying to keep those three factions functioning together.
“We are much less diverse, sadly, today in terms of both parties. Is there a liberal Republican wing? Not that I can think of. For Republicans and Democrats alike, there is a more unified, bloc-ish mentality. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. It makes it that much harder, for one thing, to make a deal. People have demonized the idea of making a deal. The idea of compromise is now anathema. That’s absurd! The other party is not going to have a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment and suddenly come over to your point of view. In order to get things done, everybody’s got to give a little. And you make that impossible, then you make work impossible. And that’s very much where we are.”
For all his flaws in the two plays, Johnson reminds us of a different time in American politics—still ugly and sometimes petty, but productive. Says Schenkkan,“I certainly don’t make any apologies for Johnson’s foreign-policy disaster. But that has clouded or obscured his considerable domestic-policy achievements. He really is the civil-rights president. I really do think we are seeing a re-evaluation of Johnson’s legacy. And I’m proud to say that I think these two plays are part of that.”
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
