In his most recent memoir, well-bred conspiracy theorist and megalomaniac Gore Vidal lets us know that he wrote his 1960 Broadway success The Best Man, about Democratic Party corruption in the presidential nominating process, to help out his pal Jack Kennedy, then making a White House bid, and that it worked. Vidal’s delusional arrogance aside, his satirical melodrama was, to be fair, the product of an era in which middle-class Americans took Broadway playwrights and their ideas seriously.
Alas, though, by 1968, when the country’s politics and culture had changed so much that Vidal was moved to write Weekend, a barbed-but-dizzy comedy about a moderate Republican whose agenda to end the Vietnam War might get wrecked by his mod playboy son’s interracial romance, he found himself writing in a genre and industry that could no longer speak to average citizens and influential ones at the same time. Weekend tanked—almost never to be revived—and shortly thereafter, Vidal stopped writing plays altogether, which is a significant loss.
Director Kiely’s sporting, briskly paced revival—amusingly resurrected in the town that actually helped Jack Kennedy—is not a case that the play is either an unearthed masterwork or (curiously, given its race-based plot) in synch with the current election. But it’s what political theater, and theater in general, so often fails to be: a really, really good time. As the senator, flamboyant talent Hamilton dials himself down and buttons himself up to fine effect as he leads a roundly winning ensemble. As for the immaculate Slusher as his conflicted spouse, let’s just say that politicians’ wives who repress their instincts so as not to interfere with their husbands’ poisonous agendas—looking your way, Laura—probably aren’t deserving of representation this humane.
