From breaking bad to being lbj

Filled with arcane talk about “procedural votes”, All the Way is not standard Broadway fare. But beyond Cranston’s star power, the producers are also counting on timing: The story of a ruthless president who got things done —without blinking at the costs and compromises — reminds us that partisan gridlock doesn’t have to be a permanent condition.

“I think audiences are hungry for a play of this size and ambition,” said Robert Schenkkan, the playwright. “There’s something about 20 bodies on the stage wrestling in this muscular visceral way with the political issues that still haunt us.”

At its centre is Cranston, 57. “Bryan has the two things you want in the actor who plays LBJ,” Schenkkan said. “He’s incredibly charismatic and charming and funny. And he’s also terrifying.” All the Way, which originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with another actor in the lead, covers the first 12 months of Johnson’s presidency, beginning with the assassination of John F Kennedy and ending with his own victory in the next election.

But what it’s really about is the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the landmark Bill that officially ended almost a century of Jim Crow. It is at once moral drama and historical pageant, with players that include Martin Luther King Jr and Stokely Carmichael; Senate giants Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell; FBI despot J Edgar Hoover and Alabama segregationist George C Wallace.

And it is almost insolently long for a Broadway show.

For all but 15 or 20 minutes, Cranston is enthroned in the Oval Office, prowling the stage in two-inch lifts to bring him closer to Johnson’s towering 6-foot-3, attached to a telephone that seems an extra limb — cajoling, wheedling, bullying, threatening, lying and bleating at the 19 other actors who play some 60 parts.

Dubious conduct in a person, but useful in a political animal, even if Johnson would in the end defeat himself. “I wanted to play LBJ,” Cranston said, “because he is the King Lear of modern theatre in this play.”

Prosthetic nose, earlobes and chin help, but “I do the voice and his body movements”, Cranston said. He listened to White House tapes and made research trips to the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where he met, among others, Johnson’s younger daughter, Luci.

What he can’t mimic is Johnson’s slovenliness, the sagging frame and feed-sack belly. “I need to do eight shows for five months, I need to be slimmer,” he said. “I need to have my body support me. I need my vocal strength.” That means a carb-free diet as well as a vow of silence on Mondays, when the theatre is dark.

In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which is as much psychological portrait as biography, Doris Kearns Goodwin described Johnson’s political skills as “a surrogate for love and acceptance”. Cranston read it closely and discussed Johnson with her — his neediness, his insecurity, his fear of being alone. “He was a morass of self-loathing,” Cranston said.

But in 2014, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, with anniversaries of the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, a year away, Johnson endures as something far more interesting and even inspiring: the last and perhaps greatest of all legislative presidents, with his wizardly grip on the levers of governance at a time when it was still possible for deals to be brokered and favours swapped and for combatants to clash in an atmosphere of respect, if not concord.

Through a wealth of facts, All The Way depicts the means by which political change comes in a nation so large and diverse.

But the true theme is deeper: the rootedness of the present in the past, the blurring of history and memory. The shifting battle lines drawn onstage — between blacks and whites, Northerners and Southerners, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans — feel at once distant and familiar.

Put most simply, All the Way is a metaphor about democracy, each of us a political creature craving to be heard above the collective din. “The power makers deciding, and the disenfranchised watching it, until they demand their place,” Schenkkan said.

“We embrace the chaotic aspect of democracy. It’s a fluid thing. Groups form and coalesce, drift apart.”
Or as Cranston put it: “You’re in a political arena, and there’s a lot of people. The scope of it needs to feel presidential and big.”

And though Schenkkan has already written a follow-up to All the Way, called The Great Society, which follows Johnson through the crushing finish of his presidency, Cranston isn’t ready to think about continuing with the role.