By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
You can’t blame the boys for wanting to skip off on their own.
What with the pressure of newspaper reporters and family and fans crowding their camp site. That would spoil any camping trip. So why not jump in the car and head out into the woods?
That seems like a good idea until the deer jumps out and the car hits it. Now our campers are stranded away from all those other people and the rest of the world. Awkward position to be sure especially if it’s 1921 and the companions are Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the president of the United States, Warren G. Harding.
The Toledo Repertoire Theatre brings audiences along on this adventure gone awry in “Camping with Henry and Tom” by Mark St. Germain and directed y Lane Hakel. The show is being performed at the Tenth Street Stage, 16 Tenth Street in Toledo. Showtimes are Saturday, Oct. 19, at 8 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 19 at 2:30 p.m. and next weekend on Thursday, Oct. 24 through Saturday, Oct. 26 at 8 p.m. and Sunday Oct. 27 at 2:30 p.m. Click for tickets. According to the author, the drama is “fiction suggested by facts.”
Crawling out of the woods leaving behind the still breathing deer, the three confront a stay in the woods and each other.
Ford (Gary Insch) is the ringleader. He and Edison (Norb Nowak) are friends, though Edison later questions that. Edison wonders why Harding (Benjamin Foreman) was invited. He refuses to address him as “Mr. President,” and tells him to his face he voted for his opponent.
Harding garners little respect. He comes across as a good-hearted and a little dim. His favorite part of being president — a job he never wanted — was at mid-day going out to the White House Lawn and greeting the people who gathered there.
Harding lives at the whims of others —his political backers who are largely corrupt and his wife, whom he calls “the Duchess.” He finds his release in games of poker with his cronies and in a closet canoodling with a a girl almost young enough to be his granddaughter with whom he has a love child.
While Harding never wanted to be president, Ford does. He sees the processes of industry as the key to effective government.
He also is pressuring Harding to sell him at a bargain rate a stalled hydro project at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, envisioning a massive industrial project. The reason he invited the president along.
Edison, the eldest at 74, is a cynic, and not impressed by his genius nor the inventions that sprang from it. He is especially bitter about motion pictures. He believes that technology is being stolen from him.
He’s suffering from age, is always cool, and is frail.
He is Ford’s hero though they disagree on spirituality — Ford is pious while Edison says he has nothing against God, just the “middlemen.”
As the discussions grow increasingly contentious, Edison pierces through Ford’s bluster with sharp witticisms. The plot softens as the three reflect on their childhoods, and Edison recalls his muted reaction to the drowning death of another boy. He doesn’t remember the boy’s name he says.
The actors’ commitment to their characters makes for intriguing drama.
Ford is an especially a tough sell. A haughty bully who looks down on everyone except Edison. Yet one senses that tragedy lurks behind that mark of arrogance.
Throughout the unfortunate deer suffers nearby. Harding grows fond of it, and in a rare show of moxie confronts wolves who approach it. He says that when they are found he will bring it back and have it nursed to health.
The deer’s fate is resolved with the arrival of Colonel Starling (Brad Riker) the head of Harding’s security detail. Ford had pulled the battery wires on his car to keep him from following, but eventually he shows up, and despite Ford’s efforts, takes over, “advising” Harding what he needs to do. Call “the Duchess.”
Starling clearly has little use for the president’s companions. He’d as soon leave them to fend for themselves among the wolves. Still together they shuffle off the stage into the dark and history leaving the audience more illuminated about these men who helped shape the world we live in.
