ODD COUPLE: S&Co’s Martha Mitchell Calling and No Background Music don’t go together.
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Martha Mitchell was no princess, but her telephone was. And back in the early 1970s, it was the Watergate whistle blowers’ secret weapon. In Martha Mitchell Calling, which is in its world premiere at Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company (through September 2), playwright Jodi Rothe rescues Mitchell from the margins of history and actress Annette Miller renders her an unforgettable amalgam of the prophet Cassandra (with whom Martha compares herself, along with Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia) merged with Tennessee Williams’s Amanda Wingfield and an aging Maggie the Cat. In a 90-minute play that is almost but not quite a one-woman show, Miller’s Martha shares the stage with an at-first dashing, later repudiating John Mitchell played by John Windsor-Cunningham and relegated for the most part to a stool behind a portrait frame. He doesn’t get to do much more than sweep Martha off her feet in flashback and then try to put a lid on her. But Windsor-Cunningham did make me wonder whether I’d have felt differently about the Watergate felons if Nixon’s stony, double-chinned attorney general had really looked like John Forsythe.
Most of the play takes place in December of 1974, before a cascading pink swath in Mitchell’s peach-hued Fifth Avenue apartment boudoir. There she busies herself guzzling gin, taping her memoirs, talking back to her husband’s Washington trial on TV, and dialing her princess (usually late at night, when well lubricated) to open her big mouth and unleash the “voice in the wilderness” that made venerable White House correspondent Helen Thomas and newscaster Eric Sevareid her partisans, despite the Nixon administration’s efforts to discredit her as drunk and crazy. As Martha tells it, it was she, a diehard Arkansas Republican, who “thought Nixon hung the moon” and (purred as if it were a seduction) persuaded her Democratic husband to “join me in the party of Lincoln.” To hear Rothe’s Martha tell it, she and John had quite the lusty sexual connection — until the Watergate cover-up took over and he forsook her for Tricky Dicky, a man the fun-loving Martha then pronounces “as exciting as a fish-stick dinner” and “more paranoid than Bambi in the forest fire.”
In the S&C production directed by Daniela Varon, Martha Mitchell Calling gets a little muddled at its climax, when our heroine recounts her mistreatment at the hands of the FBI while her husband clamored to get the cover-up rolling. But backed by a barrage of slides, it’s informative, entertaining, and pertinent. And Miller, tough, effusive, and sexy, flouncing in pink peignoir and a crown of curls, triumphs in the role. She makes you wish you’d been on the other end of the wire when Martha was picking up the phone and bringing down the administration. But she also makes you feel the character’s heartbreak when her bejowled hanky-panky partner betrays her for Nixon.
On the bill with the irrepressible Martha Mitchell Calling is No Background Music, a subdued 35-minute collection of excerpts from the letters and journals of Vietnam-era combat nurse Penny Rock, conceived and performed by S&C stalwart Normi Noël. Less a theater piece than an act of bearing witness, this understated reportage of wartime horrors and a traumatized nurse’s dreams is disturbing, but it pulls the tonal rug right out from under Martha Mitchell Calling, with which it shares nothing but a time frame. There may be a place for Noël’s proxy report from the killing fields, but Martha Mitchell’s coattail isn’t it.