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John Lithgow stars as mighty scribe Joseph Alsop at Manhattan Theatre Club

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Quick – who remembers Joseph Alsop?

I sure don’t, since Alsop retired as a syndicated political columnist back in 1974 when I was still a school boy.

But my elders tell me, and certainly playwright David Auburn assures the audience in his new drama “The Columnist,” that the WASP-y Alsop once was a significant conservative pundit and a Washington D.C. insider from the 1940s until he gracefully departed the political arena.

A Pulitzer-winner for “Proof,” Auburn now offers his latest work, “The Columnist” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where Manhattan Theatre Club’s proficient premiere opened on Wednesday.

Charmingly performed with aristocratic accents by the immensely personable John Lithgow, Alsop registers as a right-minded gentleman who enjoyed his influential powers and never missed a deadline.

Still. Alsop was a rock-ribbed, old-school Republican who took advantage of his family ties to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to forge his career as a journalist and later became an ardent admirer of (and casual advisor to) New Frontier liberal champion John F. Kennedy, which certainly suggests that the columnist was a more flexible thinker than many conservatives today.

Auburn’s two-act play, which studies the personal far more than the ideological side of the man’s life, opens in a Moscow hotel room in the late 1950s when the middle-aged Alsop has just enjoyed a sexual encounter with a younger Russian guy (Brian J. Smith).

Of course, the Russian is a KGB pawn and we later hear that when his gayness was exposed, Alsop went to the State Department and forthrightly told his story.

Headlines were suppressed but blackmail and dogged Alsop’s subsequent life, although he arranged a fairly contented marriage blanc with a Washington widow (Margaret Colin, being ever so gracious) and remained sufficiently influential to hector President Lyndon Johnson into escalating the war in Vietnam.

The trouble with “The Columnist” is that Auburn tells us more about Alsop than actually dramatizing his life, which is episodically related through the early 1970s. Alsop’s myopic tours of Vietnam are described by a disdainful Times reporter (Stephen Kunken) to the columnist’s long-suffering brother and fellow journalist Stewart (Boyd Gaines) rather than depicted. Nor do we ever see Alsop directly interacting with Kennedy and Johnson, which certainly would be illustrative of his character. Auburn also omits the key scene when Alsop admits his sexual indiscretions to U.S. authorities.