Review: Matthew Broderick portrays a pre-MAGA everyman in ‘Babbitt’ at La Jolla Playhouse

Two-time Tony Award winner Matthew Broderick sinks into the malaise of middle age in the new stage version of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 satirical novel adapted to the stage by Joe DiPietro in a production at La Jolla Playhouse directed by Christopher Ashley.

Broderick is as natural in the role of the worn-out businessman as he was as the impish high schooler in the 1986 John Hughes film ‘’Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Gravity appears to have won a final victory over his character, whose conversation is as creaky as his gait.

Babbitt’s conformist spirit is willing, but his flesh is weak. The moment he opens his eyes in the morning to face another day, he seems overcome by the idea of getting himself into gear. How in the world is he going to squeeze into his gray suit?

Later in the play, after Babbitt catches an adulterous second wind, Broderick turns the character’s attempt to sit on some pillows on the floor into a moment of giddy physical comedy that had the La Jolla Playhouse audience seizing up in hilarity and no doubt a little sympathetic discomfort.

Lewis’ novel turned its title character’s surname into a noun. The word “Babbitt” came to signify a “materialistic, complacent, and conformist businessman,” as one online dictionary defines it.

H.L. Mencken, the gimlet-eyed newspaper columnist who was a champion of Lewis’ work, wrote a column decrying the way the word “Babbitt” was being “mauled and ruined by ignorant journalists” who were applying it “indiscriminately to all varieties of businessmen.”

Entertainment & Arts

The year in theater: A time of struggle but with enough brilliance to sustain us

Alex Edelman’s ‘Just for Us,’ the genius of Stephen Sondheim and a Tony Award for the Pasadena Playhouse were among the highlights of Los Angeles theater in 2023.

Dec. 4, 2023

The character of George F. Babbitt was a specific type. Mencken points out that he’s not especially successful, that his business is “petty and piddling,” and to think of him as a leader is completely misguided.

But what makes Babbitt a Babbitt is his pompous hypocrisy. As Mencken observes, the character, “full of highfalutin fraud and bombast,” attempts “to make the world believe, and even to convince himself, that his trivial and sordid money-grubbing is all altruistic.”

Babbitt knows the price of every new appliance that enters his home and the value of nothing that contains spiritual substance. When his teenage son, Ted (Chris Myers), complains about having to read “old-fashioned junk by Shakespeare” at school, Babbitt doesn’t extol the glories of great dramatic literature. He merely reminds his easily distracted boy that “Shakespeare is required to get into college.”

There’s a sophisticated elegance to this adaptation of “Babbitt” that is impressive and briskly enjoyable yet somewhat incongruous. The play emerges from a sleekly modern library, where patrons are perusing old editions of Lewis’ classic.

Broderick’s Babbitt is wheeled out into this scene on his sleeping couch, where he spent the night after too much drinking with the fellows. Facts about the character are reeled off by the expert ensemble. The actors take turns as narrator before assuming characters in the story.

We learn that Babbitt, citizen of Zenith, “a mid-size, middlebrow city in the middle of America,” is not fat but extremely well fed, with a baby face marked by wrinkles. He’s a staunch believer in the Bible, though he’s never actually read the book. And he’s a lifelong Republican, “who never understood why anyone would be anything else.”

Matthew Broderick and Ann Harada in the play “Babbitt” at the La Jolla Playhouse.

(Jenna Selby)

Something’s amiss internally in Babbitt, who does the unthinkable this morning in an act that approaches domestic insurrection: He uses the guest towel. Myra (Ann Harada), Babbitt’s wife of “many, many years,” takes it all in stride, as she’s wearily wont to do. But her husband’s despondent mood is dragging her down.

Breakfast at the Babbitts is a dispiriting affair. All Babbitt wants is for his family to march in upwardly mobile lockstep, but conformity isn’t an easy thing for a father to control. Ted would rather be a mechanic than go to law school. Myra longs to be invited to one of the dinner parties mentioned in the society page of the local newspaper. And Tinka (Anna Chlumsky), Babbitt’s youngest whose kiss each morning is the high point of his day, is always squealing for something, whether it’s more milk, a better family car or a longer vacation.

The politics of Lewis’ novel are still trenchant despite the homogeneity of the society that was being satirized. Babbitt’s rise in local politics after delivering some pro-business, anti-union speeches evokes aspects of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric. Both men want to turn back the clock to a whiter and more patriarchal time when corporate interests ruled the day and religion kept critical thinking at bay.

Lewis’ portrait of America is somewhat defanged in DiPietro’s adaptation. The anti-immigrant stance of Babbitt and his fellow businessmen is captured, but their racism and antisemitism are elided.

The La Jolla Playhouse production presents a kinder, gentler version of “Babbitt” that’s basically a character study of a man who wishes “to no longer feel so dead inside.” There’s a more excoriating American satire waiting to be unleashed on the stage, and it’s hard to imagine any era more deserving of such harshness than ours.

The staging is mesmerizingly efficient. Walt Spangler’s scenic design, glossy and uncluttered, enhances the production’s agility. Lewis’ prose can be heavy going, but the action flows effortlessly in DiPietro’s play. The mix of narration and dramatization is seamless. There’s never a dull moment onstage.

But in casting a diverse group of actors to flesh out Babbitt’s world, Ashley proceeds as though his political work is done. The company — which includes the excellent Francis Jue in the role of Paul Riesling, Babbitt’s best buddy, and the delightfully droll Julie Halson as a number of prominent Zenith women — is first-rate.

Babbitt is a flat character, and that is exactly how Broderick plays him. He makes the most of this one-dimensionality, treating Babbitt almost like a figure in a musical who is meant to be broadly portrayed. There’s not much inner life to unearth in a protagonist whose weather-vane identity is cobbled together from magazines, retail catalogs, newspaper op-eds, religious sermons and corporate pieties.

Broderick seems to find the lack of deep psychology liberating. He reveals without having to dig.

When Paul is arrested after shooting his wife, Babbitt is prepared to commit perjury to get him out of jail. He’s closer to Paul than anyone else in the world. The violent reality of what his friend has done never seems to occur to Broderick’s Babbitt. His righteous moral obtuseness is the most chilling note in this production.

Babbitt’s self-satisfied face is the face of America ready to sell democracy to the most obvious conman. This is the parable of a man who in pursuing his own narrow-minded interest negates himself and undermines his community.