The Originalist and Passion Play

There’s a depressing irony at the center of The Originalist, Arena Stage playwright-in-residence John Strand’s smooth, easily digested, genially middlebrow work of (recent) historical fiction about Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s longest serving and most divisive associate justice: The energetic young woman of color just can’t hang with the cranky old white guy.

This is not what you want to hear, probably, any more than it’s what I want to write. But “the notes are the notes,” as Strand’s Scalia declares in the first minute of the show’s 105, elucidating both his passion for opera and his strict constructionist view of the Constitution. (Sound designer Eric Shimelonis punctuates the show with selections from Puccini, Mozart, and five other Scalia-approved composers from antiquity.)

Gero, a venerable artist whose physical resemblance to Scalia was more than casual to begin with, told the New York Times he spent more than a year researching the part. The justice even allowed the actor to join him for lunch in his chambers last December after Gero watched the court hear oral arguments.

The performance that’s emerged from all that homework is a magnificent theatrical recreation of the jurist whose acerbic wit and flair for dramatic oratory is esteemed among even that half of the country (in Strand’s ballpark math) that detests him. Gero is, well, supreme. If The Originalist were a feature-length monologue—like Thurgood, the Laurence Fishburne-starring biography of Justice Thurgood Marshall that played the Kennedy Center in 2010—it might’ve been a masterpiece. And let me be clear, to

Article source: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/46999/the-originalist-and-passion-play-a-supreme-antonin-scalia-and/