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Review: The City of Conversation

(c) LAWeekly.com

May 20, 2016



By Bill Raden

There are at least three potentially riveting tales lurking in The City of Conversation, Anthony Giardina's sweeping if ultimately nonsensical 2014 Washington, D.C., political potboiler. The most illuminating of them is the history lesson (highlighted by Hana Sooyeon Kim's proscenium projections) that Giardina delivers on the upheaval of Washington society wrought by the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. That's when the influence once wielded by the genteel Georgetown dinner parties, which famously functioned as the capital's informal halls of power from the days of JFK through the fall of Jimmy Carter, was largely swept aside by the rougher, take-no-prisoners partisanship of the incoming neoconservative tide.

Another is the dramatic roman à clef that Giardina seems to have in mind in his portrait of Hester Ferris (Christine Lahti), his imperiously WASPy and fiercely liberal lioness of a hostess, loosely based on the Georgetown society doyenne Susan Mary Alsop. Alsop reigned over the era's "government by invitation" culture of Washington's glittering "salonisma" set by strategically hosting nonpartisan gatherings that effectively forged enduring social and political alliances between nominal Beltway antagonists.

Finally, there is the darker and should-have-been gripping examination of the age-old emotional turf warfare between mothers and their daughters-in-law. Giardina uses those combustive jealousies to spark the melodrama of The City of Conversation from the moment that Hester meets Anna (Georgia King), the ruthlessly ambitious, right-leaning fiancée of her son, Colin (Jason Ritter), who has returned with Anna — along with a right-wing political agenda — from the London School of Economics just ahead of the Reagan ascendency.

Much of the fun of the play comes in Act 1 as Giardina lays the groundwork (on Jeff Cowie's majestically photorealistic drawing-room set) for the fireworks to come by showing both women in action: Hester as she and her Capitol Hill boyfriend (Steven Culp) charm conservative Kentucky Senator Mallonee (a vibrant David Selby) and his wife (the excellent Michael Learned) at a dinner whose main course is "a little Judiciary Committee thing"; Anna as she brashly ambushes — and upstages — Hester by hijacking the evening and bolstering Mallonee's wavering opposition to a bill crucial to Ted Kennedy's coming primary challenge to Jimmy Carter.

But little of the play's initially fascinating color — and even less of its momentum — survives into the second act as the story jumps ahead to 1987 and becomes mired in the weedy ideological debate surrounding the contentious confirmation hearings over Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Colin and Anna are now Republican congressional staffers, and Hester a newly doting grandmother, as Giardina unconvincingly ups the ante by contriving a climactic showdown in which Anna uses the couple's young son (Nicholas Oteri) as a bargaining chip to sidetrack Hester's secret lobbying against the confirmation.

The important state-of-the-nation political drama that City of Conversation so earnestly strives to be is a routinely cheered staple of any New York theater season, though it rarely travels well. And director Michael Wilson's otherwise sumptuous production at the Wallis is no exception; though a stellar ensemble delivers its share of wryly pointed cameos (along with Learned and Selby, Deborah Offner is particularly memorable as Hester's taken-for-granted, social-secretary sister), the first act's weave of the personal and political proves too tenuous to remain compellingly raveled.

Though the story includes enough ripped-from-the-headlines history to flatter the intelligence of the average New York Times subscriber, its driving hypocrisies, in which ideals matter more than individuals and principles take precedence over people, never feel rooted in a plausible humanity. Held together by hoary plot devices rather than psychological insight, the two women's climactic, Medea-scaled emotional pyrotechnics come off as stridently egocentric and monstrous. A third-act coda that attempts to morally redeem Hester's bloodletting with the election of Barack Obama only further blunts the play's tragic bite with a bumper sticker–like bathos.

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