The Conscientious Objector

SLAV TO LOVE Wiest, left, begs Cumming not to go.

Photograph: Theresa Squire

When the characters in Michael Murphy’s The Conscientious Objector are not actually reading aloud from newspapers—which they do with wearying regularity—they might as well be. In this attenuated survey of Martin Luther King Jr. and his public criticism of the Vietnam War, nearly every line sounds like a paraphrase from an op-ed column or biography: This is one from the history books, boys. And when the script is not busy tacking exclamation points onto nakedly informational sentences (“Secretary McNamara has infected everyone around here!”), it can only sputter clichés (“Martin, when it comes to this war, you’re gonna have to decide: What are you, a man or a mouse?”).

Murphy’s previous play for Keen Company, Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), was structured as a formal legal deposition, so the stiltedness of the dialogue seemed deliberate. Here, the exposition is cruelly exposed in scene after awkward scene. Languidly directed by Carl Forsman and stranded on a characteristically cheap-looking set by Beowulf Boritt, the actors try in vain to give the play some shape: D.B. Woodside, the man who would be King, comes closest to succeeding; the hypertonic Jimonn Cole (as James Bevel) and the frozen-frowned Bryan Hicks (as Ralph Abernathy) fall shorter. Even the well-seasoned John Cullum, as Lyndon Johnson, can’t rise above the banality of his final face-off with the good reverend (LBJ: “What am I gonna do?” MLK: “What am I gonna do?”). What should be the story’s climax sinks with a whimper, drowned in a tepid bathos.

—Adam Feldman