Playwright: Douglass Scott
At: Apple Tree Theatre, 1850 Green Bay Road, Highland Park
Phone: 847-432-4335; $35-$45
Runs through: Dec. 17
By Jonathan Abarbanel
'An idea that ain't dangerous ain't worthy of bein' called an idea,' a union organizer tells young William O. Douglas in Mountain, as Douglas rides the rails to New York City to attend law school. Douglas went on to teach law at Yale, and then was recruited into Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration by Joseph P. Kennedy ( John F. Kennedy's father ) and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis ( the first Jew on the Supreme Court, after whom Brandeis University is named ) . When Brandeis retired in 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the 40-year-old Douglas to the Supreme Court, where he served longer than any justice to date: 36 years.
Douglas never forgot about dangerous ideas or his populist roots in the Pacific Northwest. To his dying day, he remained an ardent and outspoken liberal and champion of individual rights ( and civil rights and environmental law ) , and railed against Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Richard Nixon, William Rhenquist and just about any other Republican who crossed his path. 'Republicans and spiders have got conservative and ugly all locked up,' Douglas says in Mountain, a biographical study of his life and career.
As a play, Mountain is passionate, witty and engaging, rather than dramatic. The cast and script benefit from Mark E. Lococo's unfussy in-the-round staging, which is essentially simple yet fluid and energized. Craig Spidle is dynamic and committed as Douglas, and is strongly supported by versatile Carey Cannon and Kurt Ehrmann playing everyone else ( from Douglas' mother to his four wives to FDR to Nixon ) . The company respects the material, but has fun with the script's occasional breeziness.
Above all, Mountain is a platform for Douglas's philosophy of government and justice. As such, he's the ideal spokesman for an indirect but crystal-clear attack on the current Republican regime's erosions of constitutional law and individual liberties. Although never mentioned, Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., are obvious targets of the playwright's pointed wrath. I say cheers, but those sympathetic to our current leadership are forewarned.
Playwright Scott doesn't ignore Douglas's personality flaws, but he does minimize them: the political ambitions ( FDR wanted Douglas as Vice-President in 1944 but Democratic bosses installed Harry Truman instead ) , the four wives ( two of them much, much younger ) , the alienation of his children, his ego and his meddling in all things governmental. Douglas's regrets tend to be over matters judicial—such as his support of Japanese internment during World War II—rather than personal, although a memory of a gay man he knew in college is both personal and political.
Mountains—the Cascades and the Himalayas—that Douglas hiked throughout his life are the metaphor for the man: craggy, dangerous, unpredictable, blemished and soaring. A towering figure, if imperfect, Douglas grows larger in death with each fresh headline and this play tells you why.