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| Tod Randolph in CASSANDRA SPEAKS at Shakespeare and Company. Photo: Kevin Sprague |
Such pertinent questions are all too frequently overshadowed by marketing or political considerations. We want, as the late Nora Ephron wrote, to celebrate women who are the heroines rather than the victims of their lives. There are such a dearth of such heroines in theater that I want every one-woman show to succeed. This summer, two Berkshire companies are offering one-woman shows. Both feature intelligent, frank, and charismatic women who broke new ground in various ways. Both star gifted and seasoned actors. Both scripts were adapted from books—one a biography, one an autobiography—that examine the themes of love, work, and the Second World War in the protagonist’s life. Both are set in living rooms and make extensive use of a telephone. And both illustrate what’s lost and what’s gained by casting stories in literary and dramatic form.
Shakespeare & Company’s Cassandra Speaks was written by the late Norman Plotkin and drew extensively on Peter Kurth’s biography of Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961). Plotkin died a relatively unknown playwright, but Thompson was perhaps the most famous woman journalist in twentieth-century America—one of the many early, female foreign correspondents who deserve to be written back into American history. Raised outside of Buffalo, New York by her widowed father, a Methodist preacher, she was sent as a teenager to live in Chicago with her aunts, then graduated from Syracuse University in 1914.
After working and writing for the women’s suffrage movement for several years, she decided to travel and try freelance journalism from Europe. As luck had it, she managed to interview a leader of Ireland’s Sinn Fein movement shortly before he died and, on the strength of that success, talked herself into a non-existent position as the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s Vienna correspondent. A few years later, she graduated to the New York Post’s correspondent in Berlin, reporting from that city and on the rise of Nazism in Central Europe. She interviewed Hitler in 1931, dubbing him “the prototype of the little man.” Three years later she became the first journalist to be expelled from Germany.
Back in the United States, she began writing a highly popular, syndicated newspaper column, read by 10 million people, as well as another monthly column for the Ladies’ Home Journal. As if that was not enough, she became a regular news commentator on NBC radio, where her opinion carried considerable political weight.
Dorothy was the model for the heroine of the play and later movie Woman of the Year. Her private life was also chock full of interesting people and events. She was bi-sexual and married three times (number one was a Hungarian, Joseph Bard; number two was American novelist Sinclair Lewis; and number three was the Czech artist Maxim Topf, with whom she lived happily until her death in Barnard, Vermont).
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| Tod Randolph in CASSANDRA SPEAKS at Shakespeare and Company. Photo: Kevin Sprague |
The premise is hard to believe and sustain over the course of the performance, a far too flimsy a device on which to hang a serious piece of documentary theater. Veteran actor Tod Randolph gamely “goes with what she’s got,” to use the journalistic motto. Randolph is an extraordinarily versatile actor and accomplished director whose work I’ve thrilled to in dozens of roles at Shakespeare & Company, including as Virginia Woolf in Vita and Virginia; Rose in Enchanted April, and Jacques in As You Like It. Here, though, I did not get a clear sense of the character she was playing.
Randolph is working against a clunky script riddled with clichés that contains few of Thompson’s most memorable lines and unaccountably portrays this feisty, self-confident woman as silly and addled. Although Dorothy adopts the convention of speaking to the audience as though they were “company,” it didn’t work for me.
Although there’s much putting on and taking off of shoes, much declaiming into the telephone to various callers, and much typing, we never get to hear Dorothy’s actual writing voice—curious, given that Thompson’s reporting and commentaries are the reason for her place in history and that her radio broadcasts are available.
Although the design elements—a lovely set whose elements were underutilized, a pleasing costume for Ms. Randolph, competent sound and lighting—are all in place, the direction seemed unimaginative, and the play fell flat when I saw it. Perhaps it was an off-night. Dorothy’s unusual and complicated life certainly is full of drama. It deserves study, and I suspect many theatergoers will do as I did: get a hold of the book.
