When George Clooney brought Good Night, and Good Luck to the stage earlier this year, it set a record for the highest-grossing play in Broadway history. Clooney, making his Broadway debut, was nominated for a Tony award for his portrayal of Edward R Murrow, a giant of broadcast journalism.
But for diehard fans of the original 2005 film of the same name, which was made in response to US involvement in the Iraq war, something was missing. In that version, Murrow was played by David Strathairn, one of the US’s most perceptive, subtle and compelling character actors. Why did he not reprise the role on stage?
“I was much too old and it would have been hard to actually pull it off that many years later,” Strathairn, 76, cheerfully admits via Zoom, his spectacles pushed up to rest on still-lustrous white hair. “Hats off to him [Clooney] for getting it to Broadway. The play would be an amazing part of a curriculum at schools of broadcast journalism or political science. I would hope that they would mount it to give some perspective.”
Strathairn’s latest role is that of a grandfather who fought in Vietnam long ago. In A Little Prayer, a family drama written and directed by Angus MacLachlan, he plays the patriarch of a tight-knit but unravelling family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Bill finds a kindred spirit in his daughter-in-law, Tammy (Jane Levy), but suspects his son (Will Pullen) is having an affair with a co-worker.
Strathairn was drawn to the project because of MacLachlan’s writing, having seen his previous works Junebug and Abundant Acreage Available. He says: “His focus was such a frank and sincere and generous looking into a family, a small little tight world with its own particularities and peculiarities and how it was done with very gentle, kind of simple but also a very compassionate approach. I love that.
“No big bells and whistles. Obviously this family is going through some issues that are fairly potent and have a lot of resonances and a lot of banana peels for that family to slip on. But how they navigated that landscape in the story when I read the script, I thought, was quite alluring to me and I thank him for asking me to be in it.”
MacLachlan’s small but flawless diamond of a movie is an empathetic, never-judgmental study in how hard marriage and parenting can be. It is also not incidental that both Bill and his son are military veterans. Bill has imported an ingrained stoicism and “need-to-know basis” to family life; his son has PTSD. In one scene, Bill talks with other men who served in Vietnam and discusses a comrade who struggled to reintegrate into civilian life.
Strathairn has spent time with the military during his work with Theater of War Productions, which uses theatre – often dramatic readings of ancient or modern plays – as a springboard for community conversations in military bases, prisons, hospitals and other venues.
He reflects: “That experiential reality is always there and so it was there in Bill but there’s a whole aesthetic that you don’t talk about it, you don’t bring it home. That informs there’s a lot of stuff going on inside everybody in this household and we got to bring it out because, in order to deal with it, you’ve got to talk about it.”
A Little Prayer wears its politics lightly. There are nods to the opioid epidemic, the stigma around abortion, the plight of military veterans and the unglamorous nature of blue- and white-collar work in small southern towns long neglected by elites. In clumsier hands, the film might have put on a Maga hat and tried to explain the rise of Donald Trump. But MacLachlan’s playing field is more modest and, as a consequence, delivers something more profound.
Strathairn adds: “It presents PTSD, it presents abortion and drug abuse and the struggles that everybody has dealing with things like that, and puts it in a very sincere and equitable level. You can’t really land on, oh, this is a movie about that or this is a movie about that. This is a movie about human experience and I hope that’s why it’s striking a chord, ringing a bell for a lot of people in a positive way.”
Strathairn’s career has also included taking on a number of historical characters such as Murrow (he describes his Oscar nomination as “a little bit of icing, but the cake was actually the making of it”), Robert Oppenheimer, William Seward and John Dos Passos.
He also recently took on Jan Karski, a Polish soldier, resistance fighter and diplomat during the second world war, best known for his efforts to inform the western allies about the Holocaust. Strathairn has performed Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, a one-man show devised by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, at venues in the US and Europe including Poland itself.
Is there a difference between playing fictional and historical characters? Strathairn reflects: “The responsibilities, the duties there are different. With a guy like Bill you get a lot more different choices in which way to go. But when you’re doing someone like Murrow or Karski and you have as much reference material as possible, it’s your challenge and responsibility to honour the legacy of who they were as much as possible.
“Hopefully you look a little bit like them – that helps – but still, when you’re given these kind of challenges to represent or depict a historical character that everybody could go and research, it keeps you in the lane. With historical characters it’s important not to reconfigure or reinvent. It’s our responsibility just to be a conduit as much as possible.”
The responsibility may be even greater in the era of Donald Trump, who has launched an all-out assault on cultural institutions, universities and knowledge itself, seeking to divide the US rather than unite it. The president has seized control of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and ordered a review of Smithsonian Institution museums, complaining that there is too much emphasis on slavery.
Strathairn believes artists have a more crucial function than ever, saying: “One thing that we were talking about on a set recently was, does it fall to the arts, of all forms, to be our historians now? If they’re going to get rid of revisionist history about what they want it to be, saying about the Black experience, the Native American experience, the LGBTQ experience, all of these things that are part of the museum of our life, of our history, if those things are going to be thrown in the dustbin, who is going to preserve that history?
“It seems to us it’s going to fall to film-makers and novelists and those who are doing television series and documentaries and poets and writers and painters. Because this phenomenon of the creative arts has always been that: to reinvestigate, interpret but present and reflect on everything that makes up our human experience.
“Then what if we are not allowed to do a play or a film or tell a novel or story that deals with something that’s contrary to the present regime? People are on tenterhooks about it, all the way from the mega studio down to the poet, from the people who hold the levers of entertainment down to the street musicians. What’s going to happen? What is happening? It’s something that needs to be reckoned with.”
Trump’s efforts to police language, influence media narratives and reshape culture have invited comparisons with the Soviet Union or other regimes from history. Does Strathairn believe his country is sliding into authoritarianism?
“I don’t know if there’s another word for it but it’s certainly a whitewash according to one particular aesthetic and kind of horrific,” he says. “I mean education – what are you going to do if you don’t educate? You’re going to forget and you’re going to be completely vulnerable to whatever agenda is in the hands of those who are controlling it.
“Let’s hope that the present regime doesn’t say, OK, we’re only going to make movies about this and we’re going to clamp down on streaming services. Who knows? Authoritarianism is a very frightening concept when it comes to the arts. But so many towns have their own little film festivals and the curiosity is still there and the desire for that form of information, that form of entertainment, that form of escape. You can’t kill that. Artists will always find a way.”
In 2006, Strathairn reprised his role as Murrow in Decency, a campaign ad for then Democratic congressional candidate Kirsten Gillibrand. He did not catch the recent Broadway run of Good Night, and Good Luck. But despite time’s arrow, he is still more than capable of channeling the spirit of Murrow and delivering a rallying cry for freedom of speech as a human imperative.
He continues: “We can keep making potent little films like A Little Prayer or Nomadland or Good Night, and Good Luck or anything that is sincerely and frankly and with equanimity making people feel like we are neighbours, we can relate, that your problems are my problems and the stuff that divides us is flimsy and shouldn’t divide us.
“What film can do, what theatre can do, what the arts can do is bring a lot of people together in one place – people from all different walks and beliefs and ethnicities and everything and say, man, we’re all together in this. It’s like what Karski says: governments have no souls; individuals have souls; and the common humanity of people is the real protector of human rights. We have to take care of each other and that’s critical today in terms of what’s happening out there.”