Diving into the choppy waters of America’s culture wars
WITH EVERY day that Trump eyes another term as president, Paul Grellong’s play becomes ever more pertinent. Harvard history professor Charles Nichols (Julian Ovenden in the role played by Bryan Cranston in an earlier Los Angeles production) has invited a white supremacist to speak on campus.
His students are outraged as is his Jewish dean Amy (Tanya Franks) who sees something fake about Nichols’s stated reason for giving a Nazi apologist the kudos of a Harvard platform. “The answer to hate speech is more speech,” argues Nichols.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the issue of tolerating far right opinion on campus has been overtaken by the tolerance given to antisemitism at universities. (Either way Jews are the most discomforted).
But as the supporting characters assert themselves here the play reveals a disturbing undercurrent in American culture that has something of the chilling effect of the arrives when Nichols’s star undergrad student Luke (Michael Benz) intellectually squares up to Baxter (Giles Terera) the history professor and media star who Nichols mentored. Baxter has returned to the faculty to persuade Nichols to drop his Nazi speaker and so save his reputation. But as white Luke and African American Baxter encounter each other in a bar the student reveals an antipathy towards Baxter that is racist as it is shameless.
Dominic Dromgoole’s production creaks somewhat as it attempts to follow the u-turning timeline of Grellong’s narrative. And the author indulges a love of plot twist that distracts from the main thrust, especially in the somewhat laboured scene where Jewish student Maggie (Katie
Bernstein) confronts Amy for allowing Nichol’s invitation. But Lucas Benz superbly conveys how a white supremacist world view is gaining momentum, even in the upper echelons of American society. And if can reach there, it can reach anywhere.