There’s the art, and then there’s the baggage.
One would be hard-pressed to think of a recent production more weighed down by cultural context than this mounting of David Mamet’s new play “Henry Johnson” at Victory Gardens Theater.
It’s the convening of the cancelled. Mamet himself has become a vocal conservative and Trump supporter, which has made him the subject of significant uneasiness, if not outright hostility, within the liberal theater community.
Victory Gardens has its own over-complicated narrative. Once among the most respected companies in Chicago, the institution was deemed as unfriendly to protestors following the death of George Floyd and tried to recover. It ultimately shut down with some vaguely identified future in mind. This is its first production since, intended to celebrate the institution’s 50-year anniversary.
The production stars Thomas Gibson, a highly successful and respected television actor who himself became persona non grata in Hollywood for alleged anger-management issues on the set of “Criminal Minds.”
That’s a lot of baggage to, shall we say, unpack and sort through.
But if you artistically crushed on Mamet in your formative years, and missed the wonderful Biograph Theater, there’s a compelling case to be made that this is an event deserving of curiosity, at the very least. It’s not a world premiere exactly — the play previously ran at a small theater in Los Angeles, but the press was not invited. This is, in essence, its public world premiere, even though Mamet and the LA cast, including Shia LaBouef have finished filming a movie version, which will be released in a single theater and online next month.
And here’s the welcome surprise: despite all the baggage, the art does manage to shine through. It’s really very good, particularly Mamet’s play about a hapless guy who just can’t seem to help getting taken advantage of and whose fortunes deteriorate from fine to terrible to worse. The production, directed by Eddie Torres, feels under-rehearsed, but Gibson and, especially, Keith Kupferer as a prison guard deliver compelling if unpolished depth.
In the first scene, we meet the title character Henry (Daniil Krimer, effectively shlubby) a longtime, loyal figure in some undescribed corporation. Henry has asked his boss Mr. Barnes (Al’Jaleel McGhee) to hire a friend. The problem is that this friend committed a violent crime and needs a potential job to get released on parole. So Mr. Barnes digs and digs into why exactly Henry wants to do such a big favor for a college friend he wasn’t really that friendly with, piecing together the history of the relationship and suggesting that maybe Henry has been carefully “groomed” for just such a purpose.
We never actually meet that old college friend, but we do go to prison for the remaining three scenes of this concise two-act play. There, Henry meets Gene, played by Gibson, who schools Henry in how to be less of an easy mark. You can imagine how that goes.
There’s really no question that “Henry Johnson” is Mamet’s best play in many years. Even when he wrote for the stage rather than the screen, he has mostly leaned into pure satire with “Race” (way back in 2009!) and the more recent “Bitter Wheat,” which opened in London in 2019 with John Malkovich as a Harvey Weinstein figure.
With “Henry Johnson,” he returns to his sweet spot, which is earnest rather than flippant misanthropy. The dialogue possesses the sharp staccato rhythms we associate with his voice as a writer, sitting somewhere between the streetwise and the stylized, often funny in the darkest of ways. And he deftly builds in another of his admirable signatures: sudden, satisfying expositional twists that reveal ulterior motives and call attention to language and narrative as human weapons of choice.
In theme, you can think of this Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but from the point of view of the bamboozled rather than the bamboozling, and with stakes higher than selling real estate. If his 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winner was about business as a giant con, “Henry Johnson” expands the cynical social Darwinism to encompass everything everywhere.
“They told me, when I started out, ‘This is a microcosm,’” explains Kupferer’s Jerry of prison. “It isn’t. It’s just one more place.”
In this world, if you’re not practiced at relentless manipulation, you’re roadkill.