Rep Stage's 'Trumbo': Missive Accomplished

Fifty years from now, the life and times of some famous current author will be understood through a canny collection of the writer's e-mail. Slim chance that those missives will be as dashing as the long, witty letters of Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who was blacklisted for more than a decade during the McCarthy era.

Letters aren't generally the best material for lively theater, but they're riveting in "Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted" at Rep Stage. Trumbo's son, Christopher, adapted his dad's archives into an off-Broadway play a few years ago (and into a documentary film more recently), and the resulting two-character show delivers a powerful sense of the injustice and hardships imposed by the Hollywood blacklist.

Trumbo, whose films include "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Roman Holiday" and "Spartacus," was among the Hollywood Ten -- movie artists who famously refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 -- and he was jailed for his stand. Trumbo's letters from prison to his family are often jarring, particularly an upbeat dispatch to his young son that grows somber when he signs with his name and prisoner number.

The toll on the family becomes clear as Christopher (played as a quietly proud deliverer of facts by Jonathan Watkins) recalls moving out of Los Angeles to the desert and eventually to Mexico. South of the border, it was hard for his father to retrieve the money he earned in Hollywood, and in one letter Trumbo appeals to the mother of a suddenly deceased friend who had secretly lent Trumbo his name so the writer could continue to sell scripts.

As Trumbo, Nigel Reed recites these letters with the clipped air of a detached and arrogant man, but the language has a virtuosic flair that gives this hard-boiled character persistent appeal. The sentences are meant to entertain, sometimes to punch up Trumbo's righteous anger, sometimes as apology for the poverty that comes tumbling down on him. It's hard not to like a man who signs an abashed letter to his agent thus: "A thousand apologies, ten thousand Bonzais!, and a little affection, to boot."

Reed, looking the part in heavy glasses and a dapper mustache, keeps prickliness in good balance with sympathy, and he relishes the playfulness and command in Trumbo's verbal constructions. A long dissection of criticism (written to a friend whose work Trumbo was about to comment upon) turns into a glorious lark, and a hilariously unorthodox story-length letter to his son at college (subject: onanism) is plausible as the dormitory legend Christopher says it became.

As Reed performs, strolling up and down director Steven Carpenter's sparsely dressed stage, you get the sense of Trumbo himself having a grand time at the typewriter, brandishing prose as a musketeer thrusts his sword. Despite a tall metal staircase and a central photo montage anchored by a mug shot, the show survives on the words alone; the set, with two large screens on either side of the stage, suggests movies without showing them. After a few early slide projections, the screens are little used, and the dimly lighted affair at times is a visual dud.

But with the son grinning from the shadows as the charismatic father growls and winks, the 90-minute play keeps you hooked. The history is compelling, and the storyteller sure knew his business.

Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted , by Christopher Trumbo. Directed by Steven Carpenter. Set design, Milagros Ponce de León; lighting design, Andrew M. Haag Jr.; costumes, Melanie Clark; sound design, Neil McFadden. Through Sept. 28 at Rep Stage, Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. Call 410-772-4900 or visit http://www.repstage.org.