Cassandra Speaks

Play (2012)
by Norman Plotkin

With Tod Randolph (Dorothy Thompson)

What a great subject for a play and what a great depiction of her this is. Tod Randolph’s embodiment of Dorothy Thompson is stirring, funny, unsettling, revealing and incredibly entertaining.

Apparently Randolph and Norman Plotkin, the playwright, had come to know one another as neighbors in Greenwich Village in the 1980s. At one point Plotkin drew Randolph’s attention to a book about Thompson that had recently come out, American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson by Peter Kurth, and suggested that Randolph commission someone to write a one-woman play about her. Plotkin, himself, was interested in that commission, and, beginning in 1996, he did just that, continuing to work on it until the end of his life in 2010 which, tragically, was two years before the play was first produced.

The play is written, very deftly, in such a way that it enables one to get a sense of Thompson’s preceding life and career while being engaged in the immediate drama of her anticipation of getting married, within hours, for a third time. That setup provides a sense of urgency and considerable anguished fun as Thompson desperately considers whether she will or will not, in fact, cross the threshold yet again. There is much worry and considerable drama about whether she is, in fact, still in love with “Hal,” her second husband (known otherwise to the world as the author Sinclair Lewis) and whether they might get back together.

But, overriding even this urgently playful drama, is the commanding sense of Thompson’s great devotion to clear and direct journalistic expression. Her passion against the restraint of the United States in the face of Hitler’s rapid conquest of Europe, and on behalf of refugees in the midst of war (the play is set in 1943) become abundantly clear through the telling.

Plotkin interleaves narration by Thompson with immediate action, frequently signaled by the ringing of the telephone, of which he makes a clever prop, as the target of Thompson’s rage at being interrupted, and as the vehicle of much dramatic elaboration.

Randolph’s embodiment of this role is exquisitely conceived and vividly penetrating. In one fell swoop, she gives a sense of Thompson’s sense of moral urgency, her capacity for direct and revealing journalistic description, her emotional volatility and unsettledness in romantic relationship. Somehow she makes it seem all of a piece, convincing and compelling.

There is one very long wordless moment when the character is recalling an affair she had with a woman. Randolph juices it for everything it’s worth and through a symphony of subtle gestures and facial expressions gives an entire feeling for that encounter. It is really an amazing theatrical moment.

This is a stirring depiction of an historic character carried off by a single, exceedingly persuasive, actor. It is a particular pleasure to see this portrayal of an insightful, articulate, complex and passionately dedicated woman done here so effectively.

Tod Randolph, a noted Shakespeare & Company actress, brings to the stage of the Central Square Theater the same thoroughgoing intensity and assimilation of character evidenced by Shakespeare & Company founder Tina Packer on the same stage in Women of Will in 2011, both testaments to the excellence of the work cultivated by that company and by the Nora Theatre Company and the Central Square Theater.

Try, if you can, to catch this beautifully rendered solo depiction of a brilliantly intense, fascinating character.

– BADMan