‘Camping’ Casts Little Light on the American Psyche

The year is 1921. Henry Ford invites Warren G. Harding on a camping trip, with a motive more sinister than roasting marshmallows. Presidentially ambitious himself, Ford plans to blackmail President Harding into leaving office. It almost works. But then Ford starts bragging about how he’s going to get rid of the Jews once he gets in office. So another camper, Thomas Edison, who has heretofore ignored Ford’s anti-Semitic remarks, threatens in turn to blackmail Ford. And that is how Edison comes to save the country, or, at least, the Jews.

Welcome to “Camping With Henry and Tom,” a historical fantasy tailor-made for civics class. Playwright Mark St. Germain has taken an actual incident and molded it into a remarkably wooden piece of fiction. Now at the Pasadena Playhouse, “Camping” is like a story in Boy’s Life magazine, with appropriately scintillating dialogue--”Believe it or not, there are some of us who still love this country” (Ford), and “I love to meet people. I have fun talking to them” (Harding).

Ostensibly about America at a particular moment in its burgeoning modernity, the play brings together the Thinker, the Businessman and the Politician to illuminate something about the American character. St. Germain takes three of the most powerful men in America and strands them so they are helpless in the woods, barely able to start a fire. Instead, they pursue a discussion of politics, spirituality, power and--thanks to the dilemma of a wounded deer--the nature of compassion.

But the men’s ideas sound suspiciously pat, set up for our consumption. The overbearingly wise Edison remarks soberly that one day the movie projector he invented will be cheap enough to be in every home, and then “we won’t need to get out of our easy chairs to ignore each other.” While some audience members gasped out loud at the prescience of this remark, one should remember that this play was written in the 1990s.

As Edison, Robert Prosky is too ponderous as the brilliant man trying to lob off casual witticisms that are always a little too brilliant and never actually witty. He seems like he’s trying out for a one-man Twain show. John Cunningham has a tricky part--as written, Ford is naive and hard, altruistic and evil, guileless and cagey. Cunningham plays it the only way one can--without acknowledging the contradictions.

Ronny Cox is endearingly nonpresidential, in a Gerald Ford kind of way, as Harding. He is easily confused, a reluctant president, a man of mediocre character. He is the kind of man, Edison notes, who will always be elected president in a democracy. But he is a kind man, much kinder than Ford, as evidenced by his concern and anguish for the deer.

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Paul Lazarus directs these stalwart actors in a presentational style befitting the play’s dramaturgy. Whenever it’s time for a speech, the speaker can almost always be found either downstage center, flanked by the other two men, or standing on a tree trunk under the light of the “full moon.”

Designer James Leonard Joy provides the verdant woods that fill the stage at the Playhouse with all manner of moss and leaf. John Prosky (Robert’s son) makes a brisk appearance as a Secret Service agent willing to yell at the president to get him out of the woods.

The play offers an image of the thinker-inventor Edison holding a lantern so that the president can make his way out of the woods--an image as patriotic and literal as an engraving commissioned for the Bicentennial. But this is the millennium, and for elucidation we’re going to need a little more light than that provided in “Camping With Henry and Tom.”

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* “Camping With Henry and Tom,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 25. $13.50-$39.50. (800) 233-3123. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.

John Cunningham: Henry Ford

Robert Prosky: Thomas Alva Edison

Ronny Cox: Warren G. Harding

John Prosky: Col. Edmund Starling

A Pasadena Playhouse production. By Mark St. Germain. Directed by Paul Lazarus. Sets James Leonard Joy. Costumes Ann Hould-Ward. Lights Chris Parry. Sound Otts Munderloh. Production stage manager Elsbeth M. Collins.