This review was written by contributor Chris Klimek
The Director: The Third Act of Elia Kazan, now in its world premiere run at Round House Theatre in Silver Spring, takes a few more liberties with its subject than did Orson’s Shadow, another recent Round House production about titans of the stage and screen. The latter play imagined what Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier might have talked about during their real-life collaboration on Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and in its dramatization of the pair’s shared insecurities, it succeeded in making both artists seem at once more fallible and more gifted.
Sadly, The Director does not accomplish the same for Kazan. Written and directed by Leslie A. Kobylinski and performed by Rich Foucheux, it’s basically a fictionalized, stream-of-consciousness autobiography compressed into 70 minutes. It’s another fine showcase for Foucheux’s prodigious talent, but it neither broadens nor diminishes our sense of Kazan’s. While touching on Kazan’s Olympian achievements —founding of the Actor’s Studio, putting the Stanislavsky Method of acting into the movies — Kobylinski’s script focuses on the episode that forever tarred Kazan’s legacy, his 1952 testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activies, where he named colleagues who were or had been Communist Party members during Kazan’s own brief membership. Kazan’s fateful name-naming has remained as indelible a part of his reputation as A Streetcar Named Desire; when he got an honorary Oscar almost half a century after his testimony, a big chunk of the audience refused to applaud.
Its entire set is comprised of a chair with a spotlight overhead, as though Kazan is being interrogated. His repeated assurances he is “not asking for your forgiveness” convince us of just the opposite. As the lights go down at the end, Foucheux open his arms to the sky, as if pleading for mercy from the divine. It’s a powerful moment, because Foucheux is an expressive actor. But it seems to have about as much do with Elia Kazan as it does with the Farrelly Brothers.
