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Backstage at 'The Best Man'
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 26, 2009 01:28am |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Curtis Ellis |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Sunday, September 17, 2000 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Before the parties sucked all the spontaneity out of them, political conventions were the ultimate in reality TV: no-holds-barred, high stakes contests with an uncertain outcome and a huge national audience. This is the setting for Gore Vidal's The Best Man, written 40 years ago yet still remarkably timely in its Broadway revival. Fighting for their party's presidential nomination are Secretary of State William Russell, a high-minded patrician liberal who believes politics is a process of educating people about the issues, and Senator Joe Cantwell, an expert at grabbing headlines with sensational investigations who will go to any length to win. He threatens to destroy Russell by releasing his medical records. Russell's team has dug up some dirt of its own on Cantwell, but Russell has doubts about sinking to his opponent's level by using it.
Speaking before a preview performance last week, Vidal says he was inspired by the politics of 1960, when Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Hamlet, battled Young Turk Jack Kennedy for the party's presidential nomination. "You have a very noble and eloquent and witty man, a superior man, who is just a ditherer, to be blunt about it, up against a real political operator, on the order of Nixon. So we have a Stevensonian character and a Nixonian character. But they're not thinly disguised portraits, they're archetypes. Just for fun I made the political operator with a totally virtuous private life, perfect husband, everything, and the good guy has the biggest mess of a private life going on." |
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