On Monday evening, fans loitered outside New York’s Music Box Theatre as the likes of Rebecca Hall, Morgan Spector, Sara Bareilles, Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Sarah Paulson, Patrick Ball, and Isa Briones streamed in for the opening night of Giant—what may well have been the hottest ticket in town.
Giant, from longtime director Nicholas Hytner and first-time playwright Mark Rosenblatt, has landed on Broadway after a highly praised run (and three Olivier Awards) across the pond—first at the Royal Court Theatre, later at the West End’s larger Harold Pinter Theatre. The play’s action is set off by a very real (and very contentious) 1983 article by children’s author Roald Dahl about God Cried, a book on the Israeli siege and bombing of Beirut during the Lebanon War, by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy. In it, Dahl refers to the Jewish people as “barbarous murderers,” imploring the Jews of the world to turn against Israel.
The play, as many in the audience noted, could not be more topical. Though Rosenblatt wrote Giant well before Israel’s current bombing campaign in Lebanon, those events, and the ongoing war in Gaza, were certainly top of mind for those watching. Where is the line between criticism of Israel and blatant antisemitism? And then that old chestnut: Can we—should we—separate the art from the artist? Dahl’s example proves just how little public discourse has changed over the last 40 years.
We meet Dahl—played by the towering John Lithgow—in Gipsy House, his home in Great Missenden, England, right in the middle of his public-relations crisis. He is flanked and attended to by his much younger soon-to-be wife, Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling), and British publisher Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey). With the release of his upcoming novel The Witches fast approaching—and the outcry against his antisemitic review swelling—Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dahl’s American publisher, has sent out a young sales director, Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), to simultaneously make Dahl feel looked after and get him to issue a public apology.
Indeed, it is the responsibility of Maschler and Stone, both Jewish, to convince Dahl of his moral and financial obligations to eat his words. This, of course, is ironic for more than one reason: “You understand the power of language more than anyone,” Stone reminds him.
Tall, balding, and bespectacled Lithgow’s Dahl is almost more creature than man, his bowed, puppet-like physicality resembling the Quentin Blake drawings that populated the covers and pages of his stories. The room in which the entire play takes place is meant to be under renovation, the stage littered with ladders and plastic tarps and scored by the sounds of hammering and drilling. It’s a fairly suffocating environment—not least because of the uncomfortable confrontations taking place there.
Dahl is clearly an antagonizer—even a bully—but in Rosenblatt’s script, he is also wildly funny. In what might have been the biggest laugh of the night, Stone is expressing her concern about losing the American Library Association’s support of his work, and Dahl quips, “God. Satan’s Spinster Army!”
At the end of the performance, the actors were greeted with large bouquets of roses and a standing ovation. From there, cars and trains brought guests downtown to the after-party at Capitale, a historic ballroom venue in the former Bowery Savings Bank. The imposing space and high ceilings felt appropriate for a play titled Giant.
Though snozzcumbers were off the menu, canapés were passed, and the venue boasted multiple noodle bars and corned beef sandwich stations. The Pitt co-stars Ball and Briones were among the throng, and both were massive fans of the production. “Talking about such big, heady, complicated international conflicts and trying to solve them interpersonally is our lives, and is also impossible,” Briones told Vogue. “I think it was such a well-staged illustration of that struggle that a lot of people are feeling right now.”
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