His Own Man

By T.E. Kalem

GIVE 'EM HELL HARRY! Assembled by SAMUEL GALLU

One-man shows depicting famous men have become something of a vogue in recent years. James Whitmore is an accomplished hand on this circuit. For several years he toured in Will Rogers, U.S.A. and delightfully evoked that pithy homespun humorist. But Rogers might almost be called a watercolor sketch compared with his Give 'Em Hell Harry!, which is as masterly as a fine portrait in oils.

The challenge is a bit awesome, for unlike the other famous portrayals, Truman is close to us in time, and had by far the most public exposure. An audience would quickly detect anything spurious or stagy in the performance. The acid test has already been passed, for after seeing Whitmore at Washington, D.C.'s Ford's Theater, Margaret Truman Daniel gave him her enthusiastic endorsement. Ending a sellout three-week engagement at Ford's, the show will go on to Memphis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

Whitmore seems uncannily like Truman. As the curtain goes up, the first impulse is to gasp. Whitmore gets all the personal gestures right: the cock of the head, the grin as big as the American flag, and the brisk, soldierly movements of the arms and body. He goes on to embody the man's character and personality.

Grip on Destiny. His Truman is spunky, combative, resilient, profanely funny, fundamentally honest, profoundly patriotic, and vulgar in the best sense: that is, of the earth, earthy. Amazingly, Whitmore captures the mystique of the presidency and the rock-hard reality of making final decisions. One actually does believe that this is the Truman who ordered the atomic bomb dropped, met with Stalin and Churchill as peers, initiated the Marshall Plan, and fired Douglas MacArthur. He reminds us almost too vividly of a time when both the individual and the country had a better grip on their destinies than they have had since.

Some of the playgoers who attend Give 'Em Hell Harry! will leave the theater with the misconception that they have been moved and gripped by a matchless counterfeit of reality. That is not the way theater works. On the stage, the inner eye transcends the camera eye.

The theater's only meaningful triumphs are triumphs of illusion and not replication. After the curtain rises and the houselights dim, Harry Truman is no more real in theatrical terms than Hamlet or Willy Loman or Blanche DuBois.

To enthrall an audience into a willing suspension of disbelief is the actor's most arduous task, and that is the finest phase of James Whitmore's remarkable achievement.

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