LBJ With a Touch of Shakespeare

As real-life Congress for Racial Equality leader David Dennis, Eric Lenox Abrams delivers an impassioned speech at the memorial service for three young Civil Rights activists murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan (the same incendiary incident inspired the 1988 Oscar-nominated movie Mississippi Burning). “Are you sick and tired of this stuff like I am?” he cries out from the stage left box of the Neil Simon Theatre. “I’m not feeling forgiveness… I’ve got vengeance in my heart and I ask you to feel angry with me… We got to stand up! DEMAND our rights!”

In fact, the monologue is reminiscent of a Shakespeare soliloquy, with Dennis unleashing his raw, uncensored thoughts, and it turns out that’s by design.

All the Way is part of OSF’s American Revolutions: the U.S. History Cycle, an eventual collection of 37 commissioned works inspired by the Bard’s history plays. Rauch conceived the project when he joined OSF in 2007 and hired his longtime collaborator Alison Carey (with whom he cofounded Cornerstone Theater Company in 1986) to spearhead it. So far, 21 plays have been written and six produced, and it’s telling that Schenkkan was the very first dramatist Rauch approached.

“Robert and I were originally matched up in 2002 by Libby Appel, who was the OSF artistic director at the time,” Rauch remembers. “We immediately hit it off and worked very well together on a show called Handler [about snake-handling in a Pentecostal Church]. When I decided to create a body of new American plays that looked at our own history, to illuminate where we are and where we’re going, I immediately called him.”

It makes sense: Many of Schenkkan’s works, notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Kentucky Cycle, are rooted in U.S. history and also possess the epic quality Rauch was looking for. “It’s so rare in contemporary American theatre to have plays that are packed with characters that chronicle history in the way that Robert does,” Rauch says. “LBJ is a character of outsized appetites and contradictions. The spirit is very Shakespearean.”

Another big change? Our country’s political landscape, which Rauch believes impacts how the play is received. “We originally did it in a presidential election year, and I worried that was a big part of why it was so galvanizing for audiences in Oregon,” he says. “I wondered if it would still be relevant. But like any great play, new layers of meaning are constantly revealed. When we did it in Cambridge, we were going into rehearsals right around the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Plus a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act had just been struck down by the Supreme Court. That made the play shockingly relevant. This year, it’s the 50th anniversary of every event that happens in the play, events that completely changed the landscape of this country in a way that we are still living with today.”

Although All the Way ends on a high note for LBJ, Schenkkan wrote a sequel, The Great Society, about his much more controversial second term, that premieres at OSF this summer. “It delves into the Vietnam War and all the events from ’65 to ’69,” says Rauch. “It’s a lot like Henry IV Parts I and II: The second play is a sadder story but very moving.”

Still, Rauch thinks both plays are ultimately optimistic. “We all get locked into cynicism, we complain that nothing will ever change in politics,” he says. “But these plays prove that’s not so. Our country’s history is made up of a series of revolutionary acts. We were born from one! It’s important to remind ourselves that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.”

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Photo by Evegenia Eliseeva