What's more pleasant than an unexpected bump up to first class? Before the curtain rises on the Kennedy Center's revival of "Mister Roberts," you await what figures to be a fairly uneventful ride in the equivalent of coach. How gratifying to find the evening comfier than you ever thought possible.
Director Robert Longbottom's imagining of this classic postwar comedy, set aboard a Navy cargo ship on which the sailors are more likely to die from boredom than from enemy fire, casts the play as an appealing period portrait of American pluck. Some of the soapier scenes and characters reveal the work's age. Whether we want to hear it or not, that martinet of a captain (Frank Deal) is going to reveal to us the transparent youthful traumas that made him such a meanie. And when referring to his men, the all-American good egg, Lt. Doug Roberts (Michael Dempsey), simply must utter the immortally gooey words, "I love those bastards, Doc."
Michael Dempsey as Mr. Roberts, third from left, with crew in the Kennedy Center's appealing revival of the postwar comedy.
(Joan Marcus)
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But in spite of the melodramatic mechanics and mushier moments in Joshua Logan and Thomas Heggen's 1948 script, Longbottom puts the play's 21 gobs and monsters through their paces in some persuasively moving ways. (There's also, briefly, a female landlubber in the mix.) The director takes the comedy's military-issue evocations of innocence, idealism, loneliness and cynicism and turns them into charms. A spin on this vessel, as a result, is remarkably smooth sailing.
It was a little difficult to see, when the Kennedy Center announced the lineup for its 1940s festival, whether "Mister Roberts" was a useful emblem of the arts of the era. The play, set in the Pacific in the final year of World War II, was a big hit on Broadway when it opened three years after the surrender of Germany and Japan. Audiences must have been drawn to the play's wholesome picture of manhood, a Navy story told with nary a trace of jingoism. The focus here was not on extraordinary stories of courage but on the tiny conflicts behind the front lines that mirrored the petty distractions and skirmishes back home.
Nearly 60 years later, the play reminds you that the basic building block of any military unit is a flawed human being in a uniform. It's the very American-century idea of holding on to optimism in an imperfect world -- especially given the morally clouded world we now inhabit -- that makes "Mister Roberts" worth another look.
And Longbottom's production, which opened last night in the Eisenhower Theater, is fun to look at. The set designer, Andrew Jackness, evokes the deck of the cargo ship in marvelous, almost documentary detail. Contributing to the verisimilitude, pieces of the ship have been borrowed from vessels in Norfolk and Baltimore. The background sky is lighted wonderfully by Ken Billington so that at times you gaze upon a pink Pacific dawn or a purple Polynesian dusk.
The set's the stuff of little kids' fantasies. A working winch helps move loads of goods from the cargo hold below deck. On a turret that rises impressively from the stage, a sailor is stationed at one of those powerful high beams that illuminate the nighttime sea. Above the stage, too, the tower revolves to reveal the quarters of Deal's despised captain, such a son of a gun that he refuses to grant his bored, deprived crew a single day's leave.
The embittered, working-class captain lives to torment the college-educated Roberts, denying his weekly request for a transfer to a warship. (We know Roberts is an action hero in training, because his most fervent wish is to taste battle.) The rest of the officer staff and crew, from Roberts's scared-rabbit bunkmate, Ensign Pulver (a splendidly impish Hunter Foster) to the ship's world-weary Doc (a nicely understated Stephen Kunken), want nothing but the relief that would come with the end of the war.
The play is, in a sense, all about waiting -- for peace, for sex, for action, for recognition -- and Longbottom finds arresting ways to illustrate the idea. (So little happens in "Mister Roberts" that the play's liveliest cameo is by an unlikely four-legged visitor.) Longbottom's secret weapon is the large cast, much larger than you normally see on a stage anymore, and he dresses the Eisenhower set smartly with the sailors, many of whom manage to create sharply drawn characters with only a few lines of dialogue.
At one point, in shadow, the crew members, waiting to learn whether their hopes for a day's liberty will be realized, stand with backs to the audience, gazing into port. The image warmly conveys the longing the men harbor for freedom from service and ennui and care.
Dempsey, with his athletic, clean-cut good looks, has an all-American glow that works for the character. The part does not radiate much psychological depth, so the fact that the actor remains a bit inscrutable works, too. He's like the ship's homecoming king, this chap with charisma to whom the crew was lucky to have been assigned. In the most thankless role, Deal does a fine job of avoiding cartoon villainy, which is no small task, and Kunken brings out the decency in a cynical medicine man. As the incorrigible Pulver, Foster proves himself a top-flight comic actor. There's an effortlessness to his puckish portrayal, especially in the scene in which he emerges from a laundry room covered in suds. With an actor of lesser skill, it might truly have been a mess.
In the end, the deck of the ship is swabbed with tears. Mr. Roberts gets his fondest wish, and in spite of yourself, you may get a little lump in your throat. Is it okay in this time of gruesome realities about war for a military play to show a soft side? Of course. Permission granted.
Mister Roberts, by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan. Directed by Robert Longbottom. Set, Andrew Jackness; costumes, Suzy Benzinger; lighting, Ken Billington; sound, John Gromada; fight choreography, Brad Waller. With Beth Hylton, Nehal Joshi, Field Blauvelt, Thomas Nunan, Peter Wylie, Ted Feldman, Clinton Brandhagen, Jeff Cusimano, Todd Scofield, Kip Pierson. Approximately 2 hours 15 minutes. Through April 3 at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. Call 202-467-4600 or visit www.kennedy-center.org.
