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| Talkative:
Miller as Mitchell. |
An
Honest Woman
By James Yeara
Martha
Mitchell Calling
By
Jodi Rothe, directed by Daniela Varon
Stageworks/Hudson, through Sept. 9
The last stage picture says it all. As a voice-over news report
from May 31, 1976, announces Martha Mitchell’s death, scenes
from her funeral flash on the upstage wall, framed as a large
1970s television set. Then a clip of David Frost’s 1977 Richard
Nixon interview plays upstage, and, as he scowls on, Nixon
states, “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have
been no Watergate.” Meanwhile, Martha Mitchell (Annette Miller)
stands downstage, her face more aglow from her radiant smile
than from the beam of white light bathing her.
Martha
Mitchell Calling is a superb, 90-minute, two-actor play
recounting Martha Mit chell’s life and her central role in
uncovering the Watergate scandal that ousted one of the most
corrupt regimes to ever occupy the White House. This production,
a reprise of last summer’s from Shakespeare & Company
with the same lead actress and director, transfers well to
the more intimate acting space at Stageworks/Hudson, where
Miller, as the wife of dishonored former attorney general
John Mitchell, fills the stage with Martha Mitchell’s energy,
honesty, wit, courage, and earthiness.
Martha
Mitchell Calling is fluid in its use of time. Playwright
Jodi Rothe begins on Dec. 18, 1974 (as the upstage TV screen
informs), but when Martha Mitchell bursts onto the stage like
a pink honeybee in her deep pink chiffon peignoir and matching
satin negligee (costume by Shakespeare and Company veteran
Govane Lohbauer), she floats across time. In the ornate bedroom
of her 5th Avenue apartment (the expressive set by Denise
Massman contrasts perfectly with Martha’s pink mania), complete
with silver duvet on the raked bed, matching nightstands,
two telephones (one a black phone and one a “pink princess
phone”), a full-length mirror up-left of the bed, and an empty
gilt picture frame up-right, Martha Mitchell spills out her
life story, centering on her husband’s testimony before the
Senate. Directly addressing the audience, speaking on her
pink phone, shouting at the TV clips, recording her autobiography
on a tape recorder (one of many smart touches in the play),
or talking with her husband John Mitchell (Richard G. Rodgers)
standing in the gilt frame (yet another nice touch), Miller’s
Mitchell is all talk and action. She’s an aerobic exercise
for the ears, whirling back to her teen years in Arkansas—she
tells us her yearbook photo is inscribed with the ditty “I
love its gentle warble/I love its gentle flow/I love to wind
my tongue up/And I love to let it go”—to how her second husband
John got mixed up with “Tricky Dicky.”
Martha
Mitchell Calling is full of surprises, the most striking
being the passionate love between John and Martha. Their bawdy
foreplay—who’d have thought that arch-Republicans played “hide
the penny”?—serves as an earthy conduit to reveal a deep love
that makes John Mitchell’s pronouncement at his 1975 sentencing—“It
could have been worse; I could have been sentenced to spend
the rest of my life with Martha”—heartbreaking. Miller is
like an erudite Gypsy Rose Lee, exposing Martha Mitchell veil
by veil right down to her matching pink tap pants. Through
Mitchell’s phone calls to reporters like Helen Thomas, her
tape recordings, her impersonations—she does a mean Henry
Kissinger—playwright Rothe draws parallels between Cassandra
(Trojan prophetess), Calpurnia (Julius Caesar’s dreaming wife),
and Martha Mitchell, so that when Martha cries to Gerald Ford
that “women have important things to say, and it’s about time
men listen to them before it’s too late,” we understand. The
parallels with the Nixon administration and the current administration
are clear.
Near the play’s end, CBS reporter Eric Sevareid says from
the TV screen upstage, “The men of this administration have
forgotten that one person in possession of the truth and willing
to talk can bring the whole show to an end.” What’s missing
today is a woman of Martha Mitchell’s integrity, but her last
line in Martha Mitchell Calling is one of hope: “And
the truth came out; it always does eventually.” Stageworks/Hudson
is to be lauded for bringing this timely play for another
look.
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