'Titans' Shrinks the Missile Crisis

If you don't know much about the Cuban Missile Crisis, by all means hustle to the American Century Theater's production of "The Titans." This small-cast, low-budget production ably reconstructs much of the bilateral guessing games and brinkmanship that made two weeks of October 1962 feel like the end of the world.

But if you're pretty well acquainted with this intensely chronicled history, whether via books like "The Kennedy Tapes" or the films "The Missiles of October" and "13 Days" or simply having lived through it, you won't be surprised by this rendition. Playwright Robert McElwaine gives you more of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev than you sometimes see; Khrushchev even gets the first and last words, and is generally a mirror image of John F. Kennedy in director Jack Marshall's lean, symmetrical production (two executive desks in opposite corners of the stage).

JFK had brother Bobby to confide in, and Khrushchev had Andrei Gromyko, and that's the mechanism by which McElwaine shows the heads of state trying to figure each other out even before Kennedy's election. The first act walks deliberately through the events that preceded the 1962 U.S. discovery of Soviet missiles being sneaked into Cuba, and in terms of accuracy, you always feel you're in good hands. (Historians: Parse among yourselves.)

Artistically, though, the play hasn't really found a compelling voice. The reporting is solid, but it's also familiar and exhaustive, and as the play zips through the years and then the increasingly fraught days, McElwaine's abbreviated scenes make TV seem like a patient medium. The characters' exchanges are so tight and to-the-point that the drama often has the verve of a timeline.

The Bay of Pigs debacle, for instance, is blurted out by an exasperated Kennedy into the phone as he reacts to the bad news, and the dialogue is so terse and compact that no matter how accurate it is, it sounds cliched.

Such are the hazards, perhaps, of writing a responsible treatment of this dense episode and wrapping things up in under two hours. There's no flow and little tension, despite the sober impersonations by the cast.

Sober, that is, except for William Aitken's rendition of Gen. Curtis LeMay, a cigar-chomping sendup of military manliness that calls to mind Buck Turgidson from "Dr. Strangelove." Aitken turns up in multiple roles as the crisis escalates, even doubling as Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and as Adlai Stevenson, memorably demanding in the U.N. of his Soviet counterpart, "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over!"

Kim-Scott Miller is a combustible Khrushchev, liberally rolling his r's and tossing y's in with his vowels and wagging his finger in his adversary's face almost as soon as the two men meet. Brian Razzino's performance as Gromyko is characterized primarily by borscht-y Russian pronunciations, and while Jon Townson and John Tweel have the nice haircuts and credible New England accents that make for recognizable starting points as JFK and RFK, respectively, they have trouble creating much beyond that. They simply grab the coattails of McElwaine's racing account and hang on as best they can.

"The Titans," by Robert McElwaine. Directed by Jack Marshall. Set design, Trena Weiss-Null; lights, AnnMarie Castrigno; costumer, Rip Claassen; sound design, Bill Gordon. Through Aug. 16 at the Gunston Arts Center, 2700 S. Lang St., Arlington. Call 703-998-4555 or visit http://www.americancentury.org.