A great play coming to Cambridge in September at A.R.T. about LBJ buy early!

[DreamGypsy]

1. Do you want to understand how American politics can work ...or at least 'worked' once upon a time...

...then go see this play.

We attended a late season performance of All The Way at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last fall on our way to visit with friends in California for a few days. Dynamite performances in a wonderfully disturbing play. From the OSF review:

Johnson is responsible for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Great Society initiative and the War on Poverty. His legislative programs created Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, the Head Start preschool program and the Job Corps. He dramatically changed American society, and much of our present political discourse involves the continuation, expansion or dismantling of these programs.

<snip>

All the Way recounts Johnson's strategy to pass the Civil Rights Act with a minimum of compromise and his subsequent struggle to hold on to the Democratic nomination for president in the 1964 election. (Johnson, of course, became the "accidental" president when Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.)

Schenkkan, Rauch and the superb actors of the repertory company give each of these figures his own life, his own story. Christopher Liam Moore is particularly moving as Johnson's longtime, trusted aide, Walter Jenkins, who is callously and summarily thrown under the bus when a scandal threatens Johnson's campaign.

With its powerful examination of power and morality, I wish that OSF had opened All the Way earlier in the season. This play is a reminder of where this country was politically in the 1960s and why we still are fighting the same battles today.

A rare opportunity to see LBJ, MLK, J. Edgar, and Stokely together again...