Theater Review—

Long Wharf’s  Slow-Moving ‘Front Page’ Remains Faithful To Original

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — From the moment you walk into the theater at Long Wharf’s mainstage and see Michael Yeargan’s lovingly detailed re-creation of the shabby pressroom in 1920 Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building – extending to reveal the filthy washroom on one end, and the dreary  corridor that shows through the open door – the operative word is verisimilitude. This is one realistic set, the kind that Long Wharf has delighted audiences with in years past.

And with it comes a play that is dripping with verisimilitude as well: eighty years ago, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a pair of veteran Chicago newspapermen, holed up in a girls’ school in Nyack, N.Y., for the summer and churned out their first play. Front Page is a cynical, funny, profanity laden picture of a single night in the Courthouse pressroom.

Against the background of a trumped up “red scare,” the mayor and his henchman the sheriff plan to use a sensational murder trial to cement their re-election. Because the defendant was a self-declared anarchist who shot a black policeman, they expect that his execution will secure enough black votes to keep them in office, despite their own well known bigotry and their reputation for flagrant Corruption.

The play takes place on the night before Earl Williams is to be hanged. As they await the execution, half a dozen journalistic hacks from rival newspapers occupy the pressroom, playing cards, trading insults, and competing for tidbits of information that will give them a different angle on the story – something that will gain them space and a byline on the front page.

Missing from the room is the legendary Hildy Johnson, whose outrageous ploys and stunts have enabled him to corner so many “exclusives” for The Chicago Examiner that he has become indispensable to his hardboiled editor.

But Hildy has resolved to leave the newspaper game. With the train tickets in his pocket, he is heading for New York, along with his fiancée and her mother. Once there, the happy couple will get married and Hildy will take a job with his wife’s uncle’s advertising firm, at three times the money he makes as a reporter.

Dramatically, just when Hildy stops in to say a last goodbye to the gang, Earl Williams manages a desperate escape. Somehow he has a gun, and uses it to shoot his way out of the room where he is being interviewed by a psychiatrist. While 400 incompetent policemen and deputies chase about the city in wild pursuit, Hildy is forced into a choice between keeping his promise to his girl or following his instincts as a newspaperman.

This play has been made into a number of movies, all of which focus on the romantic plot and the conflict between love, security and the lure of journalism. The original stage version – which is faithfully reproduced here – is more bitingly cynical, pointing up the hypocrisy and chicanery of the Chicago  machine, the way the right wing politicians used phony death threats and faked statistics to foment enough fear of communist conspiracies to divert attention from their own venality.

Similarly, the private conversations among the reporters and police are filled with racial and ethnic slurs and disparaging comments about women that capture the fellowship of, say, a Duke lacrosse team: when freed from the constrictions of political correctness, the guys can be as loud and rude as they like.

Such a frat-boy world is not conducive to mature relationships with women, and so in such an environment, Hollywood style romance is not likely to thrive.

In their “writers’ Epilogue” to the play, Hecht and MacArthur make the point that rather than criticizing the sensationalism and hype of the newspaper business, they were actually looking back with sentimental nostalgia on their years in that old boys’ club, calling it a valentine to the reporters of Chicago.

That comes across. This play is not really about ideas or values. It is more Chicago than All The President’s Men.

As such it has some outrageous lines and some funny scenes, but without the music it tends to drag, especially in the first of its three full-length acts. Sometimes verisimilitude – with its seedy, shabby, hard-drinking, bickering character actors straight off the set of Law and Order – can get a bit old.