Stephen Wells, Baristanet's esteemed theater critic-at-large, reviews David Wiltse's "Sedition," playing through Sunday, at Madison's Playwrights Theatre, temporary residence of 12 Miles West Theatre Co.
Because I once served on the Board of Directors of Playwrights Theatre in Madison, and find their state-wide educational mission to be a landmark program, it's difficult for me to write anything negative about their productions. But it's even more difficult - actually, impossible - for me not to be totally honest in a review.
So when one of their productions falls short - as was the case with their earlier offering this season, "Flying Crows" - I simply decline to write about it. Happily, their current production of David Wiltse's "Sedition" presents no such constraints; it is, quite simply, the best and most fully developed and well-made new play to premiere in New Jersey in the last couple of years.
Unfortunately, its run ends this coming Sunday, so there isn't much time to make it over to Madison to catch it. But the route is one that you should get to know because the theatre on Green Village Road there is now also - thanks to the helping hand of Playwrights - the temporary home of 12 Miles West Theatre Company, which lost its space in Bloomfield earlier this season.
Long before McCarthyism cast shame upon Washington in the middle of the last century, an intolerance even more insidious was adopted into the American rubric by Woodrow Wilson's administration as it attempted to promote America's interests and involvement in World War I.
A sanctioned witch hunt, with the purpose of nailing anyone caught speaking out against the war, or even knowing of someone who did, was embodied by government agents, such as Mr. Wiltse's Megrim, who, as played by Walker Jones, arrogantly and self-righteously tried to smoke out those who mistakenly thought they were protected under the First Amendment.
Megrim's target, and the focus of the play, is a German professor at the University of Nebraska, named Andrew Schrag, brilliantly portrayed, with fine nuance, by Playwrights Theatre's artistic director, John Pietrowski. By tempering Schrag's outrage with a sense of reasoning that is his stock-in-trade, he makes the character's journey all the more harrowing.
If the evening has a fault it's one's own continual disbelief that policies and actions so outrageous and extreme could have happened in America. One desperately hopes, despite all indicators to the contrary, that Mr. Wiltse's dramatic license has resulted in exaggeration, for this is a two-hour plunge into one of the darker and lesser known episodes in American history that's been powerfully dramatized and will make all who see it even more wary of how government authority can be recklessly misused.
-- Reviewed by Stephen Wells
-photo, Playwrights Theatre. Andrew Schrag (John Pietrowski) tells his wife, Harriet (Marianna McClellan) that a deli has been burned because they didn't change the name of sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage."
