Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, starring Emmy winner Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad as President Lyndon Johnson, has incited not only “buzz” but audience demand: the production, which runs through October 12, sold out before opening night. It premiered last summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), directed by Bill Rauch ’84, who also directs the current American Repertory Theater (ART) production. (Rauch, artistic director of OSF, is one of the theater professionals featured in Harvard Magazine’s exploration of “The Future of Theater.”)
Playwright Schenkkan conceived Johnson as a Shakespearean protagonist, and Cranston brings him vividly alive as a towering, flawed, likable, and charismatic figure who drives the two-act, three-hour play. Seventeen talented actors playing 44 roles surround LBJ, as Johnson navigates the tumultuous first year of his presidency, from November 22, 1963, to his election in 1964. The multiple roles produce some casting ironies: Reed Birney, for example, plays Senators Hubert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond; Susannah Schulman plays Muriel Humphrey and Alabama first lady Lurleen Wallace; and Peter Jay Fernandez, who acts the part of NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, also turns in a cameo as a shoeshiner polishing senatorial footwear.
Most of the action turns on the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the election campaign that pitted LBJ against Barry Goldwater and Wallace. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., convincingly realized by Brandon Dirden, stands as the moral anchor of the play, which dramatizes the divisions in the black community at that time, with Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and Wilkins voicing competing strategies and tactics. Hubert Humphrey, then Senate majority whip and aspiring vice president, and meddlesome FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean), also share ample stage time with Johnson.
The audience sees LBJ as the consummate politician, capable of expert maneuvering and surgically precise arm-twisting, a leader with vision and ideals, yet grounded at all times in political pragmatism. Cranston’s bravura performance in the lead role illuminates Johnson’s earthy, profane humor and nearly irresistible persuasiveness, along with the conflicts that made his Oval Office a combat zone as well as an arena of extraordinary social invention.
There will be a panel discussion of the play, moderated by Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and including Peter Jay Fernandez, along with three scholars, on September 23 at 4:00 P.M. at the ART.
