Kinetic’s “Henry Johnson” Asks Visceral Questions With No Easy Answers

If you remember the scene in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” when Al Pacino’s character bamboozles some poor sap in a bar with a stream of grandiloquent bullshit, and sells him on a worthless real estate investment, then you have a good idea what his new play (presented by Kinetic Theatre, in only its third production) “Henry Johnson” (2023) feels like.  Although in this case there are three bullshitters – a lawyer, a convict, and a prison guard – who try to bamboozle the feckless and morally ambiguous central character after whom the play is named.  What we as the audience are tasked with is to judge them all, which is – in this didactic age of pro forma art – quite refreshing, and actually quite challenging.  Mamet offers no moral handouts.

The essential criterion any artist or writer must demand of his or her work is the question “what’s at stake?” and in this case, we are never told.  It simply becomes evident at the end.  Thankfully, there is no MacGuffin in this play: I’m sure Alfred Hitchcock would be nonplussed as to how to film it.  But that’s why “Henry Johnson” is so stimulating to watch.  Mamet starts off in medias res – with absolutely no contextual markers — and is willing to trust his language to bring the audience along with him.  How many playwrights would risk this today?  As the renowned editor Gordon Lish stated, regarding literary texts, “Information is friction,” and the lubricity of this work is exemplary of such an ethos.

The language in this play is so minimal that almost every statement is elliptical . . . it’s like listening to a jazz guitarist comping with only the barest shell voicings.  The characters aren’t finishing each other’s sentences; we are.  This actually draws the audience in and makes everyone a participant, and every pause between words, intriguing.  

Ironically, the main character, played by John Steffenauer, has the fewest words.  He’s a virtual anti-Hamlet: essential to the action, bewildered by events, but utterly laconic.  The way Mr. Steffenauer plays him in the first scene, he could have just wandered in from the street and delivered the same, halting, inchoate lines.  To have offered a more polished delivery would have killed the integrity of his ambivalence.  His soul is devoid of inner voice.  Like a blind person, he discovers the world by bumping into things, and judges them by how much they hurt.

As David Whalen’s character Gene — the old-time convict Henry meets — we encounter what the film critic James Agee once called Bogart in Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” – a “Nietzsche in dungarees.”  He’s clever, perfidious, and brilliantly inscrutable, the way a baneful man who’s had too much time to think in a dark cell can be.  Whalen is one of the few actors I’ve witnessed whose physiognomy is totally subsumed by his interiority.  His appearance transmogrifies with each role, not through the help of makeup or costumes, but by the way his character’s essence emerges, like a man swallowing his own ego and regurgitating the bile of lost humanness.  (Whalen’s naïve shopkeeper “Donny” persona in Barebones Theatre’s “American Buffalo” three years ago looks nothing like his menacing jailhouse “Gene” today.)  His scene with Henry in a prison cell is a shrewd cat-and-mouse performance, reminiscent of the encounter between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice in “Silence of the Lambs.”

Cotter Smith, as the lawyer Mr. Barnes, also has a compelling cat-and-mouse pas de deux with Henry: are we noticing a motif here?  Mr. Smith in one sense has the greatest burden in this play as he’s the first character to talk and thus has to establish the almost alien nature of Mamet’s dialogue.  It’s as if we’ve just landed in a strange country where people speak a language that may be English but uses none of the conventional rules of syntax or grammar.  Hence, he must make it palatable, and does so, very convincingly.

The final character, Jerry, played by David Butler, is seemingly the least threatening of Henry’s interlocutors: he’s an aging prison guard who moves slowly and doesn’t seem to have the intelligence or guile of Henry’s other acquaintances, but there’s something deeper here that will come out, and he may be the most nefarious of all, depending on how one reads human nature.

Behind all of this is the savvy direction of Kinetic founder Andrew Paul, who is a master of not getting in his actors’ way.  Mr. Paul has a gift for bringing together performers from diverse backgrounds and letting them interact the way utterly disparate humans do.  (I’d love to see his treatment of a Genet play like “The Balcony”).  This is the kind of playscript that in lesser hands would fall apart after the first three lines, yet Mr. Paul brings a coherence to what on the page looks like gibberish but when heard sounds like poetry.  If you know Mamet, you know what I mean.  If you don’t, then see this play and be enlightened as to how language can sound when it’s spoken not like literature, but like people talking in the desperation of crucial moments.  It’s a kind of visceral expression you’ll rarely hear in most commercial dramas.  And this is one of the few plays you might want to see twice, as you won’t be getting the same performance twice.  Not with language, acting, and direction this original, and risky.

Appropriate to the nature of this production, the technical work of scenic designer Johnmichael Bohach, lighting designer Andrew Ostrowski, sound designer/composer Mark Whitehead, and costume designer Kimberly Brown is precise and compelling.  And it all meshes in the intense black-box environment of Carnegie Stage, which has become, thankfully, a fitting home for Kinetic Theatre.

My only criticism of Mamet’s narrative is the choice of smuggling a gun into a prison, which is a common conceit, almost to the point of cliché.  It’s used in the 1990 film “Desperate Hours” in a nearly identical manner, albeit with different results.  But this is a minor point in an otherwise superb show.  

Mamet, like Hemingway, has created his own vernacular, and with it, a different world – if we follow the philosophical premise that language controls thought – or to put it more poetically as the philosopher Wittgenstein did, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”  

As Gene admonishes Henry, “And, isn’t wisdom always found ‘in the Low Places?’ And, wouldn’t it be bravery? To recognize it” we have to consider the veracity of this way of thinking, which may sound aberrant to us, but to those in this alternate world, may be a kind of necessary truth.  Or perhaps, just more grandiloquent bullshit.  In either case, the answer is left up to us, which is, ultimately, the greatest reward a dramatic work can offer.   

HENRY JOHNSON continues through July 26^th at Carnegie Stage, 25 West Main Street, Carnegie.  www.kinetictheatre.org or (888) 718-4253.