The question is occasioned by the Kennedy Center's decision to make "Mister Roberts" a centerpiece of its ambitious six-month festival celebrating America's contributions to the arts of the 1940s. The play, adapted from Heggen's book about his Navy experiences, was a sensation on Broadway when it opened in 1948, three years after the war. It won the first best-play Tony, and ran for 1,157 performances -- an extraordinary accomplishment for a Broadway play in any era.
"Mister Roberts" has had nothing close to the cultural impact of the classics it outran, however. Like the SS John W. Brown, "Mister Roberts" has had a tough time over the years fending off obsolescence. It virtually never receives the major mounting the Kennedy Center is providing, a white-glove treatment that includes a towering mockup of a ship on the Eisenhower stage by Andrew Jackness that at more than $300,000 is the most expensive theater set the center has ever commissioned.
A computer-generated rendering of the ship designed for the Kennedy Center production of "Mister Roberts." The set cost more than $300,000 to create.
(Design Andrew Jackness)
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It's a slice of military life, and it will be interesting to see if it captures the imagination of contemporary audiences. (Ticket sales have been sluggish, the center says.) A 1955 movie version starred Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon, the latter winning an Oscar; the best-known member of the Kennedy Center cast is Hunter Foster, who appeared on Broadway in the recent "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Urinetown." The story is of a crew of a supply ship that never sees action, and of the battles the sailors and officers wage with ennui, enforced celibacy and a misanthropic dullard of a captain who refuses to grant even a single day's leave.
At the center of the plot is the ship's humane second-in-command, Doug Roberts, played here by Michael Dempsey. Mr. Roberts is looked up to by the rest of the crew, but he feels a profound hollowness, waiting out the war on this vessel of no consequence. Given current events, the graphic depictions on television of the dangers of the U.S. mission in Iraq, what Roberts craves may strain the credulity of some in the audience: He desperately wants a transfer to the front lines.
Is gung-ho still okay these days? Last year in Washington, the actor Stephen Lang unveiled his passionate, beautifully acted one-man show "Beyond Glory," in which he portrayed a gallery of soldier-heroes, Medal of Honor winners all. It was staged in what seemed an out-of-the-way but symbolically ideal location, the theater in the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Oddly, despite very good press, it was not a runaway hit; its producer, Lang's sister Jane, had a bit of a struggle attracting an audience.
It makes one wonder if nowadays, mainstream theater audiences are simply more resistant to celebratory, or even neutral, portrayals of soldiering. If this is the case, it must be tied to the notion of which groups in this divided nation feel connected to the military, and which see it as something alien. Interestingly, in the conflicts of the past century that have inspired larger volumes of notable work for the stage, World War II and Vietnam, conscription was widely employed. The policy must have ensured a greater degree of social diversity in the ranks. It must have put more writers in uniform, too.
Theatergoing is by and large an urban habit, and while new plays are unveiled across the country in mid-sized metropolises as well as large, New York remains the place where a play's cultural significance is validated. When even the most frivolous of Broadway musicals, such as the new "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," for instance, include a dig at President Bush, the political Zeitgeist is impossible to miss. In such an environment, military subjects are unlikely to find a natural home.
You can, of course, still get the taste of the soldier's lot on a stage from time to time, thanks to the enduring popularity of a master craftsman of the battle scene, William Shakespeare. For now, however, the Kennedy Center is reminding us with "Mister Roberts," which began performances last night, that the military is an institution to be reckoned with more significantly in the federal budget than on the nation's stages.
And still, some of the actors appearing in "Mister Roberts" will tell you that even a pretend comradeship-in-arms has drawn them closer to understanding what they missed. "Every man who was in World War II, that was their passage to manhood in one form or another," Thomas Nunan, an ensemble member, says during a rehearsal break one afternoon at the Kennedy Center. "And that's something we don't have."
