John Leonard Thompson as Henry Ford, Rob Donohoe as Thomas Edison and Tom Wahl as Warren G. Harding in Camping With Henry and Tom at Palm Beach Dramaworks (Photos by Curtis Brown Photography)
By Bill Hirschman
A little more than 30 years ago, Mark St. Germain wrote an insightful issues play Camping With Henry and Tom fictionalizing an actual meeting among Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and President Warren G. Harding.
He might have written it last week.
Politics’ questionable interaction with business interests (and visa versa), religion, racism, civic responsibility, coping with ever-evolving technology and a dozen other issues intersect, clash and conjoin as icons debate whose philosophy should command the future of this land of opportunity at a turning point.
Today’s time machine of those common concerns is evidenced in the admirable thinking-person’s production at Palm Beach Dramaworks this month.
We watch a genius inventor, a brilliant industrialist and a personable politician with diametrical ideologies verbally brawl in an often witty, but primarily searing dissection of America in 1921. But the attitudes, the arguments, the conflicts echo commentaries found nightly on CNN, Fox News and your family reunion.
The accomplished trio of actors and skilled direction provide all too recognizable viewpoints without simplifying them or making their proponents one-level stereotypes. As soon as you begin to sympathize or align with one character’s arguments, your hero reveals argumental holes and personal flaws.
The dialogue and the actual debates are invented, but the trio did go on a press-covered camping event in a Maryland forest in 1921. St. Germain’s dramatic creation is rooted in his research of real-life statements, writings and well-documented positions.
We meet them in a brief shot in a grainy static-marked black and white newsreel projected on a loosely held stage-high screen. (More on this later on). That’s followed by the beginning of an early 1920s film, except this one announces the title of the play with its credits. Then there’s a filmed scene (which is only played offstage in other productions) of the car tooling along before hitting a deer. Then the sheet drops and disappear, and a real-life Model T Touring car rolls onto a heavily foliaged glen on stage.
Stranded, Ford seems frustrated at the malfunction of one of his marvels; Harding seems friendly enough and Edison is bored with all of it so he reads a book.
But their deep differences run up on each other, especially when it becomes clear that Ford’s friendly invitation to a camping weekend is really an attempt to get Harding to get Congress to speedily pass Ford’s bargain basement purchase of a Tennessee hydroelectric plant. He hopes the elder Edison will help persuade Harding.
Edison’s wisecracking curmudgeon has retired from a society whose venalities seem as reliable as electricity. The scientist just wants to be left alone, but he may be forced to side with the efficient but ruthless Ford or the hapless but humane Harding. Armed with wry one-lining repartee, Edison desires to physically, mentally and emotionally distance himself from the tumult of fame, public attention and life.
He says, “I’m not a philanthropist. I’m a businessman. I measure success by the size of the silver dollar. Because the last time I checked ‘Goodness’ wasn’t bankable.”
He often responds with a rapier repartee such as when someone asks him to act his age, and he responds, “If I acted my age, you’d throw dirt on me.” When someone says, this is “the modern age” featuring Edison’s “moving pictures,” Edison grouches that his invention is locked in lawsuits and he fears a future in which everyone can vegetate at home watching them in the living room.
Harding, an experience political hand, actually hates the more crucial requirements of being President; he mostly loved the chance to meet with people. He genuinely wishes he could sidestep controversy or even resign the office, but there are limits to his reluctance such as the ludicrous one-sided deal that Ford seeks. But Harding has a history of sexual sidelines that make him vulnerable.
Ford is an aggressive meat-eating achiever who, on one hand, genuinely has a dream of saving America for the future, and on the other wants to make money and accumulate ego-boosting power while he does it. He wants the plant to draw power from the Alabama River and grow fertilizer, which could make the country so powerful that the next time there was a war, the United States could bomb opponents so completely that it would end war forever. His altruism to end all war is tinged with self-aggrandizement.
You can draw what parallels you want, but he’s not at all as simple to categorize as someone we all know.
With vibrant passion, he says, “I want to fix this country” and he condemns the “Wall Street boys” whom he accuses of destroying democracy, but he says it in a way that sounds sincere yet has a dark undercurrent to it.
But when it becomes clear that for him the ends justify the means, Harding resists, and Edison who just wants to not get involved reluctantly becomes a referee.
They are symbols of social and economic forces clashing for supremacy in the industrialized brave new world that, just in passing, cites the first notice of some man called Einstein.
Under these icons’ public images or public perceptions are vulnerabilities and flaws. As the chances off a deal fizzle, Ford stoops to implying he can blackmail Harding by having newspapers he controls print rumors that he has African-American blood.
But when Harding accuses him of racism, Ford notes he hires and trusts many “Negroes” and appoints them supervisors.
Yet, Ford separately makes a slight insult about Jews. And then deep into the evening, the affable patriotic Ford unleashes an extended unfiltered unrestrained antisemitic rant that is virtually breath-stopping.
For instance, you might cheer for Henry at first as he unreels his dream of “fixing” government — until a point halfway through the speech. To wit:
And that’s not the worst of the nasty bigotry mixed with inspiring patriotism. There’s a breath-stopping tirade of antisemitism still to come. That one ends, “If I can weed out one race, I can put Americans back in charge of our country.”
Producing Artistic Director William Hayes directs this with his trademark combination of detail and invisibility. And obviously, he owns a huge aspect helping the three actors forge these memorable distinct personalities.
But the work is a priceless opportunity for local audiences to see three of the region’s finest actors skillfully disappearing inside eminent figures who prove all too human inside. The actors make their personalities almost physicalized.
As Henry, John Leonard Thompson (last at PBD in 12 Angry Men) expertly combines his character’s intelligence, drive, dreams, patriotism, ambition with a fiery intensity that can detonate into rage.
Rob Donohoe, with 13 shows here including last season’s triumphant Death of a Salesman, inhabits Edison’s curmudgeonly crust, his seeming rejection of the world and his reluctant insertion when he cannot avoid it.
Tom Wahl, veteran of dozens of local productions, makes Harding someone who certainly is a President elected because he’s innately the cheerful guy-next-door. But he does harbor anger and resentment at being committed to a job he never wanted.
As fine as the script might be, one character might talk about a topic and then another would give his view of the same. Normally, average actors and directors could not disguise the mechanical construction of that framework. But these four artists including Hayes make those transitions smoothly and natural.
Like the performances and the direction, the production is subtly marked with an attention to detail. For instance, Bert Scott and Terry Martin’s gorgeous arboreal setting with soaring tree trunks and varied underbrush contains a large log the trio can sit on. When it is rolled toward the fire, the trunk is covered beneath with green moss.
Brian O’Keefe’s costumes are period perfect from the skimmers to the bowties to the vests, yet each man’s outfit is noticeably his own. Kirk Bookman’s atmospheric lighting and Roger Arnold’s sounds of nature affirm the sense of being alongside these characters.
John Campagnuolo plays Secret Service Col. Edmund Starling who tries to take charge late in the evening.
But the outstanding production honor belongs to Adam J. Thompson, the resident projection designer, for two creations. For the 20 minutes or so that the audience comes to take their seats, he has manufactured a seemingly rescued black and white newsreel mixing authentic footage of Chaplin and the Kaiser with those signs giving you warnings, but which he has adorned with his own verbiage, such the drawing of stick phones and telling us to turn off our “phones.” It’s projected on a stage-high sheet hanging from the trees.
But even better, once the evening starts, we see the beginning of that credit sequence and then the film of the trio in the car (which incidentally came from a Model T club in the area).
The sole inescapable problem with the work is that there is no way these three can emerge from the wooden crucible with having made a decision or change – which may, indeed, be the point. It all ends with the initial homeostasis. But what a journey.
St. Germain has had other productions at Dramaworks such as Freud’s Last Session; this play was among the first Dramaworks’ produced in its second season in 2001-02.
Camping With Henry and Tom plays through March 2 at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Plays 7:30 p.m. Wednesday- Saturday. 2 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday Saturday, Sunday. Running time: About 2 hours including one intermission. Tickets $92. Info: (561) 514-4042; palmbeachdramaworks.org
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