Giant (5*)

Like Walt Whitman famously once said, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

The Brit Roald Dahl certainly did:  son of well-to-do Norwegian immigrants, RAF pilot during World War II, children's book author, animal lover, devoted father, unfaithful husband, caretaker, and crank but in Mark Rosenblatt's brutal Giant, audiences leave the theater with his "truth" ringing in their ears:  at his embittered core, he's an unrepentant anti-Semite.  Having never read any of his classic books--although I did love the first filmed adaptation of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and Matilda on Broadway--it may be easier for me to reach that conclusion than others because I don't have any childhood allegiance to lose.

The first hour of the play seems like deja vu, as have most debates about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict during my lifetime.  It's almost possible to sit on the fence while Dahl (John Lithgow, a 6' 4" curmudgeon extraordinaire) shouts it out with Jessie Stone (Aya Cash, pitch perfect in a bright red dress), a Jewish sales director at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, over an impolitic book review he has just published alleging that Israelis have morphed into Nazis by bombing Lebanon where innocent children have died or been maimed.  It's 1983, by the way.

Both his very assimilated British agent, who managed to escape Germany via Kindertransport, and his paramour of the past 11 years (during which time he remained married to Patricia Neal, the Academy Award winning actress with whom he had five children and whom he helped nurse back to health after she had a serious stroke during pregnancy), recognize that Dahl needs to atone if his genius for seeing the world through a child's eyes is to remain profitable. They offload the heavy lifting of persuasion to the forthright American, as a representative of his biggest market. Stone, whom Dahl derisively refers to as "Stein" after asking point blank if she's Jewish, delivers a full-throated defense of her people (if not the Israelis) that ends the first act with a moral authority that still resonates with anyone who grew up in the long shadow of the Holocaust but now seems increasingly out of synch with world opinion.

During act two, Stone spends much of her time off stage as Dahl resists entreaties from the characters whose income and home renovations his talent supports to walk back his inflammatory remarks which they attribute primarily to his contrarianism.  But once Dahl crosses a red line with his two most trusted confidantes by accusing his agent of being a "house Jew," he turns to his cheery young cook and estate manager for their support. Rosenblatt uses them as proxies for the British people and the difference in their reactions reflects the same kind of generation gap that divided many Americans during the Civil Rights era.

For reasons that remain opaque, Dahl finally agrees to do an interview with a sympathetic journalist, much to the relief of everyone except Stone.  Even though she's not entirely immune to author's manipulations, she understands in her heart that genuine concern for all children--even her own disabled son--can co-exist with anti-Semitism. 

I'll say this for Dahl: for whatever reasons, he had the courage of his convictions; Lithgow, just two inches shorter than Dahl, expresses them--VERBATIM--with shocking odiousness in the play's final scene, during a spontaneous interview with a persistent journalist. Rosenblatt and director Nicholas Hynter (firing on all cylinders, as usual) leave the audience in a bind, particularly those members with young children or grandchildren:  does an author's documented bigotry merit the cancellation of work which his agent has earlier described so meaningfully from a humanist's point of view?

Giant also left me wondering about the very early, controversial and longstanding pro-Palestinian  advocacy of Vanessa Redgrave, surely one of the greatest actresses of my lifetime, whose artistry was also fertilized on British soil.  No doubt she contains multitudes, too.