SATURDAY RUBRICS: 7/5/25

Lanford Wilson's play, FIFTH OF JULY

BEFORE GOOGLE: Jeff Daniels

The photos above and below are from the 1980 Broadway production of Lanford Wilson’s play, Fifth of July, which was directed by Wilson’s longtime collaborator Marshall W. Mason. Jeff Daniels played Jed, the young botanist who was the lover of the paraplegic Vietnam veteran and reluctant high school English teacher, Ken Talley, who had lost both his legs in the war and was portrayed by Christopher Reeve. Mary Carver played Ken’s Aunt Sally.

I saw this production with Reeve and also his replacement Richard Thomas. But I saw its premiere as well in 1978 at the Circle Rep Theatre, a small off-Broadway company off Sheridan Square on Seventh Avenue South that was headquartered inside an old garage. Wilson was its resident playwright and Mason its director. They and a few other vets of the Caffe Cino scene - including Tanya Berezin - founded it. William Hurt originated the role of Ken at Circle Rep. It might have been the first time I was ever aware of him and that longing that limned his laconic presence that was stubbornly insouciant, ironically insisted on it, in fact, since irony too was always a wrinkle in his straight-laciness. I saw so many productions at Circle Rep. I loved the place and its actors and its plays. I could walk there from my tiny walk-up apartment on the 6th floor of an old building at Sixth and Bleecker above Da Silvano restaurant and once I arrived at the theatre 10 to 15 minutes later I felt so much older, sophisticated, at home. The Circle Rep location is now the West Village outpost for the Boucherie restaurant where you can get a burger for 32 bucks which is for some now the marker for sophistication, the ability to pay that bit over five dollars a bite to consume it. I paid $7 to see Fifth of July at Circle Rep. If I had gone on the weekend it would have been $8.50. My balcony seat to see it on Broadway cost me $14.50.

I read Frank Rich’s New York Times review of the Broadway production this morning and this description of Wilson and his play and our past America saddened me, made me feel both elegiac and ginned up yet again with the anger I can feel about what America has now become on this July 5th, 2025. “Mr. Wilson has poured the full bounty of his gifts into this work, and they are the gifts of a major playwright,” wrote Rich. “Fifth of July is a densely packed yet buoyant outpouring of empathy, poetry, and humor, all shaped into a remarkable vision. That vision is Mr. Wilson’s own morning-after-Independence Day dream of a democratic America - a community with room for everyone, an enlightened place where the best ideals can bloom.”

My three nephews are grown men now but when they were boys they loved Jeff in Dumb & Dumber. Who knew that titular description would come to be so apt now for the America that once fell sway to a conman but has now knowingly returned him to power and, by doing so, is turning America into a fortress of fascism and the feverishly white who are foisting their cruelty and ugliness and bigotries on the rest of the country. Daniels was the juvenile in so many of those Circle Rep productions. But he is now, ever-smart and smarter, a character actor who can lend his gravitas to leading man roles. Two of those roles were Will McAvoy in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom on HBO and Atticus Finch in Sorkin’s version of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. One does wonder what those fictional characters would have to say about the realty show character sitting now in the Oval Office.

Lanford Wilson and Marshall W. Mason were Daniels’s artistic mentors. He even founded a theatre, The Purple Rose, back in his home in Michigan where he again lives based on his experiences at Circle Rep. It has even been built at the site of an old automotive garage that belonged to his family for generations. When he was appearing on Broadway as Atticus Finch, he spoke to American Theatre magazine’s Rob Weinert-Kendt. Here are some excerpts from their conversation:

Let me ask: How do you as an actor play against something you know? Not just in the sense that you know the ending of the play, but in the sense that you might know better than your character?

Well, I’m not there. It goes back to Circle Rep. It’s so simple. Marshall Mason would preach, “What are your given circumstances? Not only going into a scene, but each moment: What do you know? And forget what you don’t know. Forget what you think you know. Forget what the actor knows. We don’t care.” I mean, is there some, Oh, I better set that up for later, and so you point the performance to there? Yes. But once you’re in that moment, that’s what makes it easier to do in your eighth month—there’s an innocence going in moment-to-moment. Meryl taught me that. She’s nowhere else except present. And when you work in the present, and use the other actors to push you into the next moment, you aren’t playing anything else except what’s going on right then.

…

What’s the key thing you learned from working with Lanford Wilson at Circle Rep?

He and Marshall were the first true artists I ever met. I didn’t know what that was until I came here in ’76. I was 21 years old. Lanford wouldn’t doctor screenplays. “I’m a playwright.”

He wouldn’t take the easy buck.

Wouldn’t do it. He might teach at a college. He might do a speaking engagement. But he would not take a screenplay job. I said, “Lanford, it’s six figures and your name’s not even on it.” “No. I won’t do it. Movies are bupkis.” That allegiance to his art was to be admired. He never told me what he thought of Dumb and Dumber.

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