E-Mail This Article to a Friend Word warrior Trumbo revels in the art of the epistle BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted By Christopher Trumbo. Directed by Peter Askin. Set by Loy Arcenas. Lighting by Jeff Croiter. Original music and sound by John Gromada. Video by Dennis Diamond. With William Zielinski and Brian Dennehy. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through March 6.

In this age of such Constitutional infractions as the Patriot Act, it’s probably wise to remember its predecessors, including the Communist witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the wake of World War II. And in revisiting the ordeal of novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted rightly conjures up the indignation of the Hollywood Ten, some of them imprisoned, all of them blacklisted by the film studios after their refusal to answer the questions of the HUAC.

But what Trumbo, which is based on the writer’s copious correspondence, makes you yearn for, in this age of cutely abbreviated e-mail, is the grand old age of articulate letter writing. Trumbo’s epistles, whether trumpeting his refusal to crumple before the studios or exhorting his college-age son to follow him in the masturbatory accomplishments of a "penile virtuoso," bristle the way he did. Good thing, too, because the theater piece compiled by the son, Christopher Trumbo, and directed by Peter Askin, relies on them utterly, adding no more to the reading of the letters than some projections and a skeletal narrative linking the eloquent blasts of Trumbo’s pen. The great Brian Dennehy, beached behind his character’s upstage desk, his glasses propped on an angry or troubled forehead, doesn’t get to move anything but those big, gracefully expressive hands and his lips.

Trumbo opened in 2003 at Off Broadway’s Westside Theatre, where luminaries including Nathan Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, Ed Harris, Tim Robbins, Alec Baldwin, F. Murray Abraham, and Dennehy rotated in the role of the epistolary strongman. This probably accounts for the oddity of staging wherein, even in the touring production at the Wimberly, Dennehy and Trumbo fils stand-in William Zielinski carry large, ledger-like scripts. (The piece is not, however, as consciously "read" as A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters.) The self-effacing Zielinski, who also serves as narrator, has to lug his around with him. Still, the production offers a sepia-toned library projected behind the writer and slides not only of the frighteningly square-looking HUAC members but of the dapper, mustachio’d screenwriter and his long-suffering family, including one of two children, their faces forlorn above large ponchos during the years the clan spent living in Mexico while Trumbo wrote scripts under false or others’ names. (He won two Oscars for scripts that did not bear his name: 1953’s Roman Holiday and 1957’s The Brave One.)

The 90-minute theater piece begins with Ring Lardner Jr.’s ironic eulogy for his fellow blacklistee and then floats back to the who’s-on-first 1947 testimony in which Trumbo refused to acquiesce to HUAC’s insistence it had the right to poke its nose into his ideological business. Charged with contempt of Congress, he was sentenced to a year in prison and served 10 months in a Kentucky slammer in 1950, sending to his 10-year-old son a charming birthday poem that recalled in doggerel the child’s coming into the world with a "mouth as wide as a full-grown alligator’s." But that wasn’t the end of it. The theater piece, like its subject, blames not the courts or the committee for the blacklist but the studios, whose financially motivated ostracism was "prompt and menacing." By forcing highly paid scribes to peddle their wares incognito, they were able to get top-drawer product for bargain-basement prices.

Certainly the theme of Trumbo’s fluid, often grandiloquent refusal to knuckle under in response to the blacklisting carries throughout the play, which eventually allows him a speech without a stamp and an envelope: his 1970 acceptance of the Writers Guild’s Laurel Award, in which he evokes the era of the blacklist as a "time of evil" in which no one on either side escaped pollution. But there are witty digressions, including the tongue-in-cheek sermon on masturbation (known around Columbia, where Christopher Trumbo was then matriculating, as "The Letter") and an insolent missive to an overcharging electrical contractor that begins, "Dear Burglars."

All of these Dennehy, broad-shouldered but slim and looking nothing like Dalton Trumbo, delivers with conviction, irony, and a fiery self-delight that makes it clear the principled writer was not without ego. Perhaps most affecting, and most revealing of the suffering inflicted on the writer’s family in an era when Communism was an Evil Empire to which even a visitor’s visa was suspect, is the scathing letter Trumbo addresses to an elementary-school principal chronicling the "slow murder" of his daughter’s self-esteem by children trickling down their parents’ righteous meanness. Dennehy’s voice cuts though this one like the knife Trumbo probably wished he could wield.