Through lens of greed, broken mission
Bryan Cranston is the explosive anchor who isn’t going to take it
Americans were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore in 1976. And — take a look outside your window — they’re still mad as hell and not going to take it anymore in 2018. But the prescience and staying power of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for “Network” — now adapted by Lee Hall into a tense, thrilling, high-tech Broadway play starring the craggy Bryan Cranston at his withering peak — lies in how brilliantly it captured how much easier it is to be angry than to articulate the cause.
Howard Beale, the deranged anchorman who seduces network suits with his cathartic, ratingsgrabbing, howled-from-the-gut catchphrase, even as he descends further and further into on-air madness, never defines that little dangling pronoun. We all wake up some mornings knowing we can’t take it anymore. Trouble is, we usually can’t define the “it,” let alone come up with a fix.
That’s because it’s the human condition, people! The existential malaise! Cry it out, scream it from the rooftops, have another drink and then go buy some neat stuff! Clickety-click.
That’s America, then and now. As “Network” understands better than any other current show in New York City.
In the pre-Fox News 1970s, director Sidney Lumet’s Oscarwinning movie was rightly seen as a parody of how the news media were retreating from their moral mission in favor of market share, the 1970s equivalent of clickbait. When evening newscaster Beale (Cranston) first reveals his suicidal tendencies in a national, on-air meltdown, his pompous bosses recoil in horror — but only until they see how many people are watching. When the greedy network suits realize that the front page of that day’s Daily News suddenly is all Beale coverage, the sharper minds quickly figure out they’ve got a lucrative populist on their hands, they ditch all that costly coverage of the world at large and give Beale, the crazy prophet spouting apocalyptic nonsense, as many microphones as they can find.
For those of us of a certain age, to watch director Ivo van Hove’s production — the storytelling takes place in part on a slew of screens throughout the theater — is to mutter to ourselves about how on earth wily old Paddy C (he died in 1981) knew so well what was coming. Everything the movie predicted, like, happened. And that’s why it no longer plays as a satire of greedy executives and facile fools but as a gut-wrenching morality play about how capitalists — and their sad-eyed human tools — destroyed most of the real news. And they did so mostly by tapping into a single human constant — anger at the unchangeable unfairness of the world. Beale, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity. Only the names change. Not the feelings tapped.
Hypnotic throughout, Cranston has some truly stunning moments in a role in which he is ideally cast: The “Breaking Bad” star is imposing and authoritative enough to make Beale’s power and potency utterly credible, but sufficiently haggard to also feel like one of those worn-out tramps in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” He’s accessible in his agony but also terrifying in his remove from the quotidian: If the perils of life get him, you shudder, God only knows what it has in store for me.
The central directorial conceit of “Network” — that the story is told through a plethora of greedy lenses — is a measure, of course, of van Hove’s genius. The aesthetic, designed by van Hove’s partner Jan Versweyveld, is rooted in the 1970s but not stuck there, allowing the ideas in the piece, which is a fancy way of saying its focus on life’s horrors, to cascade down over the intervening years. Whenever we’re in the studio — one of those places where antlike humans run around to try and calm their inner feelings of dread — the show is on fire.
Not all of the personal scenes are as strong as Cranston’s astonish solo spots. Tatiana Maslany is surely credible as a mercurial TV exec willing to dive low for ratings, but she’s unchangeable and thus inaccessible when it comes to the deeper themes of the piece. Tony Goldwyn works better — you can read the pain on his face — but he’s too tentative, especially as compared with William Holden in the movie, meaning that Cranston and Maslany can run for their touchdown into lucrative insanity with too few old-school linebackers in their faces, especially since Joshua Boone, playing a role made famous by Robert Duvall, feels uncertain, too. But there’s one blistering exception: a scene between Goldwyn’s Max Schumacher and the superb actress Alyssa Bresnahan, who plays Max’s wife, Louise. It’s a killer confrontation, instantly recognizable to anyone with a ring on their finger and a reminder of the human cost of going rogue.
But while you might wish for more depth in some scenes, that’s just not the point of the production, which arrives after success at London’s National Theatre. This is one profoundly clever show, the rare conceptual masterwork that puts all the current railing against fake news and cheap network theatrics in a much broader temporal context. If you feel like we’re all mad in hell, here’s the show that reminds you it was ever thus, suckers.