Review: The Jim Lehrer Plays

The Jim Lehrer Plays by Mickle Maher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I go back almost to the beginning as a fan of Theater Oobleck, of which Mickle Maher has always been a core member. For a good 12 years from the late 1980s until I left Chicago in 2000, I rarely missed a show, and I went away inspired every time. I missed both of these plays, “The Strangerer” and “Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double,” when they appeared, but I cheered them on from a distance and bought this collection when I first saw it on sale several months ago.

I come to it now with a mixture of admiration, nostalgia, and sadness – the sadness due to the recent death of Danny Thompson, another of the founding Oobleckers, someone I never knew well enough to claim as a friend, but someone who began inspiring me when I first saw him perform with his band Tex and the Cowpokes back in college.

The nostalgia covers these plays, of course, because Mickle – whom I knew a little better than Danny but never all that well – reminds me in general of the magic of Oobleck. The company began in Ann Arbor (or at least had its roots there) and always had an affinity not just for Brechtian fourth-wall breaking but also for breaking other imaginary walls. (I love the stage note here that one of the Lehrer characters is supposed to address the audience obliquely, as if he’s “breaking the three and ¾’s wall.) Sometimes that meant “Tiny Alice” style houses within houses. Other times it meant actors shouting strange slogans in ironic – and yet deeply felt – political statements. And sometimes it was Danny manically voicing a dozen different rubber figurines, spinning a childhood game of make-believe into an angry and hysterical critique of the contemporary political scene.

But, above all, I admire Mickle’s plays here because of their provocative questioning of the nature of art at a time(s) of strange social division.

The first of these, The Strangerer, is in the tradition of Oobleck’s election plays and, as a result, it’s somewhat dated. George W. Bush and John Kerry more or less refuse to be part of a debate moderated by the mystified (but knife-loving) Jim Lehrer. Bush is intent on murder right in the open but in a way he insists is a performance. Kerry acknowledges being asleep most of the time. The metaphors seem apt a dozen years later: Bush smilingly owned up to invading Iraq on a lie (among other offenses) while Kerry never quite mustered the anger and clarity of vision it would have taken to win his election.

There’s a wonderful weirdness to the play. It opens with Bush serially killing Lehrer, in a way that might be “real” and might be theatrical – all of which underscores the degree to which the debates of that era (presaging the debates of our own) were performance pieces rather than actual discussions of issues. They became (become) a “double” of the theater as Mickle expressly puts it in the second of these.

The play goes on to stage a non-argument between the two candidates and, while there’s a lot of humor, the ultimate joke is in the notion that they are really saying and doing nothing – or that all they are doing is performing. There are echoes of Dana Carvey’s Bush impersonation (or so it seems in the reading of this) which further underscore the impossibility of discussing real ideas, ideas that have implications for the welfare of millions, even billions of people.

It’s that standard Oobleckian outrage-channeled-through-humor move, and it’s impressive to see it played out on the page.

But it’s the second of these that really stands out. Our hero, Jim Lehrer, is now retired, and the play opens with him flustered that he’s been asked to fill out a survey declaring which of two candidates he prefers. (Mickle leaves it open which election he’s discussing, an element that keeps this all the fresher.) As he paces around trying to decide how he can determine the trustworthiness of performative creatures, he’s visited by his own double, a Jim Lehrer II who’s just returning from the debacle of the opening of his new play.

What follows is a Saturday Night Live skit…if Samuel Beckett were in the writers room alongside Michael Che and Colin Jost. There’s slapstick as each Lehrer arrives in the room just as the other leaves, and then there’s a weirdness around Lehrer’s supposed love of fine knives. And then there’s a remarkable and troubling twist when possibly another Lehrer arrives on the scene with murderous intent.

As goofy as it all is, there’s real philosophy to it. Where “The Strangerer” makes the more-obvious-now point that political dialogue is really just performance, this one probes even more deeply to the question of what performance is. Our lonely Jim Lehrer stands in his own house, ready at any moment to recite the news to an imaginary audience. He is strange, in part because we can’t know him outside the context of his television show. He is, then, I suppose, ‘strangerer’ in his incarnation as a double. And, when we try to discover the relationship between a performer and his shadow – and between the shadow that shadow seems to cause the original to cast – we’re into yet another dimension.

None of this is easy to think about. At that level it’s deeply unsettling. Where, after all, does it end if we acknowledge that we are performing in public and still performing as ourselves? As it plays out, though, it’s a perpetually funny exercise as well. Not having seen it on stage, I know I’d have laughed throughout. Having read it, I find myself caught up in the provocative way it challenges how I think of myself as a consumer of news and a citizen.


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