Occupying the same theater this spring, we have Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s reliable elegy to the downtrodden working class. Though the play is set in the middle of the last century, the production emphasizes its contemporary resonance, even outfitting the Everyman Willy Loman’s boss as a tech bro. Reviews praised it as both timely and timeless.
Then there’s John Lithgow (competing against Mr. Lane for best actor), with his sour and prickly turn as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a fiery topical debate lightly outfitted as a drama. The play, which premiered in London in 2024, finds Dahl mired in public controversy over a review he wrote about Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried,” which documents Israel’s 1982 siege of Lebanon. As the play begins, Dahl’s essay has been denounced as antisemitic, and his editor and an emissary from his publisher, both Jewish, arrive to seek a public comment that will calm the waters before the release of his next book, “The Witches.”
The play, which quickly recouped its Broadway investment, raises two major questions, to my mind. One is why we continue to insist on making art about terrible men. The other is this: Does “Giant” succeed in dramatizing the interplay between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or does it flatten that debate because Dahl is so obviously a grotesque bigot? Mr. Lithgow’s performance is a kinetic marvel, but there’s no question that his Dahl is a snarling and even gleeful hater of Jews.
The cynical view would be that “Giant” seeks to validate the anxiety, including among some supporters of Israel, that those who oppose its state actions must also be antisemitic. The less cynical view would be that all of this makes “Giant,” at the very least, a less interesting play for simply offering up an obvious villain.
“Liberation,” which is set amid a women’s consciousness-raising group in the Ohio suburbs during the early 1970s, has already won its playwright, Bess Wohl, the Pulitzer Prize for drama and is up for best play at the Tonys. I think it should (and will) win. In a way not unlike “The Balusters,” it assembles a diverse array of women (an anxious older housewife, a young blond secretary, a Harvard-educated Black book editor who had to return home take care of her mother) but to a different and far more satisfying end: Ms. Wohl performs an anthropological and historical excavation of the question on pretty much every liberal’s mind: How did we try so hard to change the world for the better and still wind up here?
