MARTHA MITCHELL CALLING @ ST. LOUIS ACTOR'S STUDIO

BY: ANDREA BRAUN, THEATRE ARTS CORRESPONDENT

Nathan Hale, Abraham Lincoln, Anwar Sadat, Yitzak Rabin, Martha Mitchell. Martha Mitchell? Why is she on this list? Well, because, according to Martha Mitchell Calling, the "big mouth of the south" belongs on a roster of patriots who gave the last full measure of devotion for their countries. Those who, by their words and deeds, proved that love of country was more important to them than life itself.

Oh, piffle. Of course, Richard Nixon didn’t cause Martha to get multiple myeloma and die at 57, but Jodi Rothe’s treatment of her in this play makes it seem as if she died alone with only her principles to comfort her at the last. This view of her is validated by an overwrought ending in which the stage is darkened with a spot on a funeral wreath. Its flowers are in the colors and shape of the American flag with a banner announcing "Martha Was Right." A voiceover by White House correspondent Helen Thomas delivers a valedictory as the tacky arrangement shines. This isn’t a complete failure as a conclusion; however, because it does make a connection between gaudy excess and Martha Mitchell.

Almost forgotten in the haze of nearly 40 years, Martha was once the vulgar icing on the Watergate cake. A sense of her importance to the proceedings is indicated by a quote on the cover of the playbill, then undermined by its source: "If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d be no Watergate," said Richard Nixon. I’ll grant that if it hadn’t been for Martha, Watergate would have been a lot less entertaining with all those dull men droning on about cancers on the Presidency and taking the fall for a guy that makes Kim Jong Il seem absolutely rational.

Martha was a drag queen’s dream. Everything about her was big—her hair, her boobs, her booming laugh. Glynis Bell is a fine actor, but she’s not physically right for Martha. She’s got the accent and the attitude, but she lacks the physicality the real thing projected. The Martha Mitchell we meet here was very much in love and lust with her husband John, Nixon’s Attorney General. She had "converted" him, in fact, from the Democratic to the Republican party, a move she later comes to regret. The idea of this being a great love story is undermined by the fact that both left their spouses to be together after an affair that lasted several years.

John Mitchell (James Anthony) is presented rather cleverly, if a bit self-indulgently, as a portrait on the wall of Martha’s girly, well appointed bedroom. Anthony sits in the frame and converses with her and comes out from time to time to depict a scene she is relating. This is a one-woman show with another person in it. During it, she drinks gin, talks on the phone (she says she’d rather "give up my gin than my pink princess and I plan to take it with me to the grave") and talks into a tape recorder, dictating her memoirs, though she does spend most of the time addressing the audience directly.

Martha has a habit of listening in on conversations, snooping through her husband’s papers, and even peeping through keyholes to get information. These tricks are presented as harmless quirks, but then she begins to hear things she doesn’t like which culminate in drunken phone calls to Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent, in which she refers to herself as a "political prisoner of Watergate." The play has her tell Thomas that Nixon should resign, but I can’t find any historical support for that exact statement. She did say, both in the play and on the record, that she thought politics was a "dirty business," and that she had given her husband an ultimatum, he must resign. He does and cites her as the reason, but she’s just an excuse. I expect her assertions that she was drugged into silence for several days are true, but after the shenanigans pulled by the aptly abbreviated CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President) we’d believe just about anything.

Lana Pepper directs with a light hand, allowing Martha to swan about between the bar and the bed as she rambles on and on and on. The interludes with John are rather a relief from her annoying monologues, as are points of view from the outside world and snippets of the Watergate hearings projected on a screen behind her bed that come up when she switches on the television across the room. It’s a clever device. Other noteworthy touches are the musical choices (by Robin Weatherall) of pertinent early ‘70s tunes, including "My Way," "You’re So Vain," and as an entr’acte bookend, "The Ballad of the Green Berets." Martha was also considered a problem by the administration for her outspoken objection to the Vietnam War in which one of her sons (from her first marriage) was serving. A bit more emphasis on this issue might have made her more sympathetic.

Martha’s life was sad, but it was not tragic, and much of her trouble was of her own making. By the time she could no longer control events at all, she wasn’t capable of doing so anyway. In Pepper’s notes, she writes that she found Martha "interesting and strong and I believed that after all was said and done, she had been right." The play doesn’t overtly acknowledge the irony that Martha’s so-called heroic acts were made possible by the same sneaky behavior employed by the Watergate conspirators.

Eric Sevareid’s observation about Martha is included here: "Men who could blow whole countries off the face of the earth were powerless when Martha Mitchell was on the phone." That is hyperbole, and Martha suffered most because she believed it with all her simpering Southern heart. It appears the playwright believes it too, but I’ll give Helen Thomas the last, ambivalent word excerpted from her memoirs in the program: "[Martha Mitchell] should be remembered as the woman who tries to blow the whistle on what was going on, but sometimes her stories seemed so out there, it was close to impossible to get anyone to listen. However, I listened and I wrote and I’ll let history decide."