Democracy’s Hero

Nevertheless, the lean, agile Irish-American leading man from New England, trailing a glowing collection of awards, two of them Tonys, earned mainly for his graceful witty work in the musical theater, is currently inhabiting the role of the charismatic German politician in Michael Blakemore’s stirring production of Michael Frayne’s “Democracy,” which is in its final weeks at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on West 47th Street.
Brandt, who resigned his post under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1974, was himself something of a mystery, a quality the charismatic Naughton embodies to perfection.
The actor admits easily that, when he was approached about “Democracy,” he knew very little about Willy Brandt. “I knew who he was,” and that was it,” he said. “In the ’60s, I was in college, and I spent some time as an international relations major, so I took some political science courses. I’ve always been interested in that sort of thing.”
Naughton has a workable theory explaining why the Brandt story didn’t attract much attention among American college students while it was actually going on.
“[A]t the time that this whole thing came apart for him, we were all watching Nixon fall apart, and Watergate. It was an exact parallel,” he said.
Naughton realizes, of course, that Richard Nixon’s story was vastly different from that of Willy Brandt. “I was just trying to remember what we were doing in 1973 and 1974, and what we were doing was watching and rooting against Richard Nixon, and watching all that collapse. That was what was dominating the headlines.”
Reading and researching Brandt, with “Democracy” firmly in mind, Naughton came up with a few views of his own. “He was known at the time, as a man who had a lot of different talents, but who also suffered some kind of depressive streak,” he said. “He is portrayed that way in the play and I think it’s pretty clear in seeing what Michael Frayn has written.”
The actor believes that the man he’s playing onstage was misjudged, both at the time and in retrospect.
“He was taken to task for getting stuck, and not doing enough, and not doing anything for periods of time, but he did something that was incredible,” he said. “He was very, very bold. After having been installed as the chancellor in 1966, three years later, in 1969, which is when this play starts, he takes this tiny little party, the Liberal Party, which is halfway between his own Social Democratic Party on the left and the Christian Democrats on the right, and makes a tiny little coalition. It was very fragile, and that’s where his boldness comes in. What he did was far-reaching, very forward-thinking and very difficult to do, taking into consideration the politics of the time. He recognized East Germany.”
Naughton likens Brandt’s situation to that of present day America where Cuba is concerned.
“We won’t talk with them,” he said. “Basically, we don’t acknowledge their existence; we won’t recognize them. We just cut them off.
“The way things were in Germany was similar. It had been that way since 1945, with a string of right-wing and very conservative chancellors and governments in West Germany.”
The actor knows that taking that action wasn’t easy for Willy Brandt. “There was a huge outcry against recognizing the East, or even acknowledging its existence, because of all the people who had been displaced. He took a tremendously bold step, and, as a result of that, I think Michael Frayn would argue that Brandt probably hastened Perestroika and Glasnost, plus the fall of the Berlin Wall, and did a great deal of good for a tremendous number of people.”
Naughton said he feels that Brandt did what he did not out of the hope for any sort of political gain.
“Hardly,” he said. “In fact, it was contrary to any such hope. So, now, at a time when I think Americans are increasingly cynical about what politicians might do and what their motives might be, it’s kind of inspiring to see this guy, Brandt, who did something for what seemed to be all of the right reasons, because he believed it was the right thing to do, and that he was doing it for the benefit of humanity, which I think it was, and I think Frayn would agree,” he said.
In fact, the actor knows Frayn’s feelings, because they are the building blocks with which “Democracy” is constructed. And Michael Frayn has personal experience with which to back up his views.
“Frayn was in Germany as a journalist in the early 1960s, and he wrote somewhere that he was tremendously moved by what he saw there,” he said. “That’s where this play comes from. He saw all of this unfold, and he was moved by the German state, by what the people had achieved after World War II. And he knew what Germany looked like in 1945.”
Naughton’s character has a speech in “Democracy” which he feels describes the postwar situation eloquently And he speaks it.
“I say, ‘in 1945, every city in Germany was reduced to rubble, so what did we start rebuilding with? The rubble, with lines of women patiently sorting the useful bricks out, one by one, passing them from hand to hand, cleaning them, sorting them. Who knows what buildings those bricks had been part of? The cellars of the local SS? The factories where the slave laborers suffered and died? They cleaned up the bricks as best they could, and with them we built the plain, straightforward cities we all live in today.’ And it goes on,” he added.
Preparing for “Democracy” was, quite obviously, something of an education for James Naughton. Playwright Frayn, perhaps best known until now for “Copenhagen” and, ironically, the knockabout farce, “Noises Off,” was enormously helpful and earned the actor’s enduring respect and admiration. The playwright’s participation however, was subtle.
“He’s a very soft-spoken polite, deferential, self-effacing sort of fellow,” he said. “Ironically, he didn’t have a lot to say to us directly. He worked though Michael Blakemore, the director, which is as it should be.”
Naughton had worked with the Australian-born Blakemore a few years earlier, in the successful Broadway musical, “City of Angels,” so his working methods were entirely familiar.
“He’s a terrific director,” he said, “and you know he was an actor into his 40s.” Blakemore has the distinction of having won two Tony Awads in a single season, one for Frayn’s “Copenhagen,” and the other for the smash revival of the Cole Porter musical, “Kiss Me, Kate.”
Naughton himself has done quite a bit of directing in recent seasons, including a Tony-nominated revival of the late Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” and, more recently, the production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” which starred his good friend Paul Newman.
Naughton’s Wilder revival started at the Westport Country Playhouse, where Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, is artistic director, and then moved to Broadway for a limited, sold-out run.
Both of Naughton’s Tony awards have come as the result of his performances in Broadway musicals. First there was “City of Angels” in 1990, and then “Chicago” in 1997.
One of the actor’s earliest theatrical successes came when he’d only been working in the New York theater very briefly.
He played Edmund Tyrone in a well-received production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” with Stacy Keach as his older brother, Jamie, Geraldine Fitzgerald as his mother, and the late Robert Ryan as his father.
That father, James Tyrone Sr., is one of the great American roles for an actor in his mature prime. In a decade, say, James Naughton will be more or less the right age to play the miserly frustrated actor and father in what is very probably the greatest play O’Neill ever wrote, and one of the two or three best dramas ever written by an American playwright.
And James Tyrone is very definitely on James Naughton’s mind. “That’s the part I’d like to play,” he said. “I’m just sitting around, waiting to go. I’ve always wanted it. I’ve always felt that was the part. But who knows, the state of the theater being what it is?”
With a little luck, somewhere, sometime, Naughton will very probably get the chance to play James Tyrone. And, in a subtle sense, being Willy Brandt may serve as a form of preparation.