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There have been any number of shameful chapters of American history, but the one chronicled in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s latest California premiere is an awfully personal one for playwright Joe Gilford.
“Finks” is a dramedy about the 1950s Red Scare and its blacklist of anyone in the entertainment industry with left-leaning affiliations. It’s about the public congressional interrogations of suspected communists to reveal more and more names of new leftists to be dragged over the coals. More specifically, though, it’s about Gilford’s parents, comedian Jack Gilford and actor Madeline Lee Gilford, both progressive activists who ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist.
The “finks” term refers to anyone who named names, pointing HUAC toward new suspects to investigate, in the hope of salvaging their own careers. Gilford has loosely fictionalized the story and changed the names of some of the characters, who aren’t quite their real-life counterparts.
Andrea Bechert’s set gives the audience a taste of what’s to come as the audience enters the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, a visual mashup of nightclub, recording studio and congressional hearing chamber.
These elements are juxtaposed in the play’s opening, as comedian Mickey Dobbs (Jim Stanek) starts a Red Scare-themed nightclub standup act, while George Psarras plays a stony-faced sergeant-at-arms, calling a hearing to order. Played with strong comic timing by Stanek, Mickey is doggedly reluctant to get involved, whether it’s with political causes or a romantic relationship. Donna Vivino’s forceful live-wire Natalie Meltzer doesn’t give him much choice in the matter. Before she’s even met him, she decides she’ll have him in her bed and by her side fighting for social justice — and she gets what she wants.
Leo Ash Evens has a wry, teasing relationship with Natalie as closeted choreographer Bobby Gerard, who’s grappling with some self-loathing of his own. And Gabriel Marin is Mickey’s easygoing pal and number-one fan as Fred Lang, until he becomes a fiercely uncompromising firebrand of resistance.
Robert Sicular makes a fine antagonist as the stuffy chairman of the House committee, putting on an oily show of benevolence that quickly falls away whenever anyone’s uncooperative, and routinely getting the names of famous movies wrong.
Michael Barrett Austin deftly portrays a variety of testifying real-life figures, some trying to put on a good show of repentance and some too beaten down to care anymore, as well as a harried radio director and a smooth, Mephistophelean fixer. Richard Frederick is a pragmatic show-biz agent and an enthusiastic stool pigeon reciting a seemingly endless list of names of supposed subversives with chilling placidity.
Psarras also plays a soothing radio announcer and a chatty bartender, and provides smooth piano accompaniment to the nightclub act and some actual songs.
This isn’t a musical, but the characters are performers, so there are a couple of comical and sharply topical period ditties by Harold Rome, including “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance” and “The Investigator’s Song.” The breezy dancing is choreographed by Dottie Lester-White, and a terrific Abbott and Costello routine is performed by Stanek and Marin.
The play premiered 10 years ago, but it still could use some fine-tuning. There are significant slow patches and repetitive scenes, especially when the topic is Mickey’s wishy-washiness. The rifts that develop between the comrades as the wolves close in would be more affecting if the characters of Fred and Bobby were more fleshed out. Director Giovanna Sardelli, who also helmed the play’s New York premiere in 2013, deftly handles its brisk back-and-forth between settings and the mix of humor and pathos.
On the whole, it’s an entertaining look back on a grim period for our country, which continues to reverberate today.
‘Finks’
What: This play by Joe Gilford is presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley through July 1
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View
Running time: Two hours and 10 minutes, one intermission
Tickets: $40 to $100; www.theatreworks.org
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
