Prince Erie

Well-padded, playing a role Orson Welles would do without salary, Daniel Seltzer ambles grotesquely around the wooden rectangular stage on which most of Prince Erieis performed. He is Jim Fisk, fat man who rejected the potentially bleak future indicated by his past, becoming instead one of the richest, most unscrupulous Americans in the latter part of the 19th Century. Fisk and partner Jay Gould began with the Erie railroad and, at the height of their spectacular careers, virtually cornered and manipulated the country's private gold reserve.

Playwright Timothy Mayer's saga isn't very pretty. Fisk began as an itinerant peddler, Gould as a dirt farmer: together they built their lives from nothing, built a legend, a part of Americana. Chronicling this tremendous growth, Mayer knowingly reminds us of the incredible amount of destruction involved. We are reminded twice in the third act by references to Sherman's campaign of destruction "from Atlanta to the sea" that Fisk's initial capital was made from war profiteering. The brilliant and terrifying second act finale takes place in a palatial banquet hall overlooking a crowd of thousands of people Fisk and Gould have ruined in a carefully engineered gold-market crash.

Throughout the play, letters, money, and clothing are destroyed, thrown carelessly on the stage where pieces remain for the duration of an act, becoming part of Fisk's legacy. Fisk reacts to his first financial triumph by destroying his Jersey City hotel room. The scene is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane destroying his wife's room when she leaves him. But in Welles's film, Kane's sole object is the furniture; in Prince Erie, the finite playing area itself cramps Fisk, and he becomes undisciplined energy trying, I suspect, to break the walls down, also Jersey City, anything that threatens to contain him. "Jersey City is our old bath water," bellows Fisk, "and we don't need it anymore." Blackout.

Lest we forget, these men are peculiarly American monsters. Mayer, through dialog, and director Thomas Babe through blocking, try two things simultaneously: to recreate the detail and language of the period, and to define a kind of American epic.

Gould and Fisk are super anti-heroes, playing for the highest stakes with little to gain but gain for its own sake; in one of Prince Erie's finest scenes, a shipboard dialog between Fisk and Gould, Gould reveals that his only interest in life is the satisfaction derived from having things, and Fisk laments quietly that he will never have a child. Though giants, both men are essentially impotent, and to Mayer--as to Welles--this is not a small part of the American myth, for their impotence is both a driving source of power and an ultimate source of failure. In a whorehouse scene just before Fisk is shot, Claudia, a whore, says to her madam, "I would rather be Mr. Fisk's whore than the President's lady." Listening, Fisk answers gently, "I would rather be Claudia's hero than President," and then follows Gould to a business conference.

Prince Erie boasts some of the finest dialog heard on a stage in-recent years. Mayer's speeches combine formal rhythms and precise images with deliberately chosen colloquialisms and small mistakes in grammar, both creating characterization and recreating the formal journalistic idiom of the period. Reporting the market crash, the Heraldreporter ends his news story with, "Threats against Fisk are freely indulged in." Fisk's early employer Daniel Drew prays, "Deliver me from the House of the Harlot, Lord, and from the rest of this here lewd company who don't give two bits for Thy commandments."

Mayer's inversions are often tragically funny in context; Drew again, on being excluded from the business operations: "Them boys is getting a damn sight too cute." Fisk's dialog masterfully combines bad grammar and vernacular with innumerable phrases from the Bible. "Poor suffering bastards," he yells at the crowd he has cheated, "You want your money? It has gone where the woodbine twineth!"

Babe directs Mayer's 31 scene opus with intelligence and precision, drawing on several different dramatic conventions. His brilliant blocking evokes the period with character groupings resembling Thomas Nast cartoons of contemporary editorial pages, and antiquated melodramatic woodcuts. Three major scenes are mimed in front of a black-and-white American flag, and it perfectly into the even pacing of the play. The most dazzling of Babe's devices concern the scene transitions, all of which are visibly effected by uniformed stagehands, and generally overlap with the action. Climactically, we watch the stage crew change a living room to an office while Fisk and an entire brass band march triumphantly around the stage.

The decision to integrate scene changes into the action is particularly fortunate, given that Mayer's construction calls for tag lines, blackouts, and the immediate appearance of a next scene. Mayer's sense here borders on the cinematographic: one transition hinges on sound (a boisterous marching song fades into a church hymn), others on highly graphic contrasts of light and mood.

Seltzer's Fisk is immediately impressive, ultimately superb. He has been stuffed from neck to calf and uses his enormous bulk convincingly to great advantage. He sways dangerously back and forth when faced by his dissatisfied mistress, breaks into an anguished trot to keep up with his evermoving lunatic father in the magnificent asylum scene, paws the stage instinctively like a bull, and is forever grabbing objects with intent to break or mangle, only to realize frustratedly that he has no reason to break them. "Your hands, Jim. Always your hands," says Josie resisting his brusque advances; sensing the importance of the line as a key to characterization, Seltzer styles much of his performance on highly dramatic gestures.

Dean Gitter as Jay Gould gives Prince Erie's most extraordinary performance. A quiet nervous deadpan conveys the tension and ruthlessness of Gould, who could "smell a nickel under twenty pounds of lard." Through disciplined underplaying, Gitter is tragic in the steamboat scene, and satanic at the end of the second act where, after the success of the gold crash, he drinks a glass of champagne in spine-chilling slow motion.

Susan Channing as Josie Mansfield is perhaps too sophisticated given Mayer's dialog, but in the third act she is genuinely moving, and always extremely beautiful. As Ned Stokes, Fisk's romantic rival and assassin, Kenneth Shapiro skillfully conveys youth and attractiveness, while remaining intrinsically hollow and middle-class. Mayer knows that Stoke's aspirations to Fiskdom are pathetic and inevitably doomed to failure, and Shapiro gets this across.

In smaller parts, mostly of parasites and people Fisk attracts into his whirlwind way of life, Joan Tolentino as a madam and Andy Weil as a barber and several drunks are funny and invariably interesting to watch. Arthur Friedman is top-notch as Drew, also as a lunatic Indian fighter speaking half in words, half in pidgin sign-language. Stephen Kaplan doing two numbers in blackface is revolting, and when revolting, Stephen Kaplan is invariably magnificent. Dominic Meiman as Fisk's secretary, among other parts, is consistently excellent, as are can-can dancer Lindsay Crouse's legs.

Catch phrases are a dime a dozen these days. Easily branded as clever and facile, Prince Erie deserves recognition as a play of some importance which approaches greatness. Its color and spectacle, energy and incredible humor, give the Loeb a kind of total theatre it rarely sees. Without attempting to offer up Prince Erie as an object lesson to aspiring Harvard theatremakers, it should just be said that Mayer's triumph is probably the best thing that's happened around this place in years.