Weird Synchonicities

Or is that synchronisms? What I mean is when two unrelated things turn out to have something in common after all. Or when two totally different aspects of your life come together in an unexpected way. We’ve all had that experience, and the immediate reaction is, “Hmm. Weird.”

So, as a crime writer, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that in working on my family genealogy, the matter of crime comes up. Like the mysterious death of an ancestor in colonial Virginia and the two murders my family was involved in. (Stories for another time.) Looking back through old newspapers, I found a juicy crime story concerning my second cousin, twice removed, whose 25-year-old wife shot and killed her 18-year-old sister, because of her husband’s attention to the younger woman. The young sister must have been quite something, because a subsequent story said public sympathy was with the accused, and an acquittal was expected.  

Having vaguely in mind the kind of gems those old newspapers can hold, I was drawn to a recent story in the Library of Virginia newsletter. It reports on the results of a patron’s random inquiry into the nearly century-old newspaper record regarding far southwest Wise County veterinarian, game warden, and lawman JL Cox. The Library staff’s research found police-media relations were just as fraught back then as they are now.

A 1927 story in Crawford’s Weekly reported the attempted arrest of a man on outstanding warrants. Refusing to surrender, the man threatened the officers, including Cox, who’d come to get him. “We had to be shoot or be shot,” Cox told the paper. He said, “Some folks may criticize, but I’d like to know what they would have done had they been in our place.”

Two weeks later, Cox was involved in another exchange of gunfire. But a few days later, after Cox complained about the coverage of the event, the newspaper issued a correction, saying Cox had not returned fire. Over the next couple of years, Cox repeatedly called on the newspaper to correct stories about his activities. It’s a distant echo of today’s uneasy relation between law enforcement and the media.

After this frequent pushback, it appears the newspaper adopted a policy of not abrading Cox’s thin skin. The way I read some of the Weekly’s later stories, the editors learned to get their digs in more subtly: “Some may have criticized Dr. J.L. Cox, county officer, for being quick on the trigger in past performances . . .” Note the vague “some.” Politicians still use that gambit today. “People tell me . . .”

In a story about a stolen car, the paper suggested that “whoever did it thought they were wreaking vengeance on County Officer JL Cox, whose Chrysler also is a maroon coupe, because of his unrelenting enforcement of prohibition, traffic, and game laws.” Readers of Crawford’s Weekly might have had strong opinions about those laws and how vigorously they should be enforced. Talking about his “unrelenting enforcement” might not have been viewed as a tribute to his dedication. It was moonshine country, after all. (A moonshiner’s wrecked car and cargo shown above, police officer standing by.)

It turns out that Cox may have been too diligent for rural Virginia, and in 1931, he was shot and killed trying to serve a warrant on a man for dynamiting fish in the Guest River. The man claimed self-defense, but the case was dismissed. Why? Doc Cox “had been fooling with” the man’s wife. That story never appeared in the newspaper; the Library staff found it in the memoir written by the Game Warden who succeeded Cox in that post. The conclusion that can be drawn from this little research project by the Library is, I suppose, that times change, but people don’t.

On the Big Screen: The Boys in the Boat

The predictable uplift sports movie generally provide is one of the greatest sources of its appeal: big goal, lots of work, sacrifice, setbacks, and, in the end—triumph! And sometimes an inspiring musical score too, viz., Chariots of Fire, Rocky.

The Boys in the Boat follows this model almost too well (trailer). Written by Mark L. Smith and directed by George Clooney, it breaks no new ground as it presents the amazing struggle by an eight-man crew from the University of Washington to compete in the 1936 Olympics. You know, the one when American athlete Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes) won four gold medals and scorched Hitler’s hackles.

The ragtag crew, brought together in the heart of the Depression, was led by actor Callum Turner (playing Joe Rantz), with my favorite performance coming from the megaphoned coxswain, who calls the speed and spurs his crew on, played by Luke Slattery. The cinematography is beautiful, and there’s a stirring score by Alexandre Desplat.

Not only were the Huskies underdogs when pitted against the East Coast Ivy League rowing powerhouses, the boat Coach Ulbrickson (played by Joel Edgerton) chose to enter in the preliminaries wasn’t even his most experienced crew. It was his junior varsity boat. Noses were out of joint. But Ulbrickson saw in the hunger and desperation (and shoes with holes in them) a drive that might take them first over the finish line. Joe Rantz gets some extra motivation through informal “occupational therapy”—late-night sanding and painting—with the elderly boatbuilder, played by Peter Guinness, as they work on the new racing shell for the Huskies team.

The Boys in the Boat is a feel-good film and, as it’s based on a true story (told in a 2013 book by Daniel James Brown), you don’t feel like you’ve been manipulated into those good feelings. The scores below tell the story.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 57%; audiences 98%.

Ben Franklin vs. the Counterfeiters

Wartime is always an opportunity for foes to flood rival economies with fake currency. Destabilizing a country’s finances can bring it to its knees pretty quickly—a contributor to the social disorder described in Michael C. Grumley’s new dystopian thriller set in the near future, Deep Freeze. The value of real money drops and inflation soars. The historical aspects of counterfeiting offer equal inspiration to authors.

In colonial times, when the country wasn’t even formed yet and faith in its future may have been a bit shaky, counterfeit money was a particular risk. Colonials preferred to rely on coinage—they could always give it the “bite test”—but when coins were in short supply, they would accept paper money more as an IOU, rather than final payment. Eventually, of course, paper money grew to be trusted and had intrinsic value. Demonstrating how seriously the legitimate currency producers took this issue, Franklin and other authorized producers often printed “to counterfeit is death” on the notes they produced. And, indeed, several Tories most responsible for distributing counterfeit bills were hanged.

This was before holograms, imbedded security strips, 3D security ribbons, microprinting, color-shifting inks, and before at least 18 countries adopted polymer plastic banknotes developed and printed in Australia. Nevertheless, printers such as Franklin (he was an inventor, after all) deployed a succession of new printing methods and materials to foil the criminals.

Earlier this week—on Franklin’s 318th birthday—the American Philosophical Society (founded by Franklin in Philadelphia) presented a talk by Khachatur Manukyan from the University of Notre Dame on Franklin’s innovations. He and his team in the Nuclear Science Laboratory have done detailed analyses of some 600 paper money notes, printed from 1709 to 1790 to identify Franklin’s methods. Of course, he didn’t have these scientific tools, but he certainly was aware of how to differentiate his currency from that of a common counterfeiter.

For a time, Franklin printed the skeleton of an actual leaf on the back side of his bills (sage, maple, parsley, for example). A leaf’s complex structure is hard to duplicate. He used deliberate misspellings and deployed natural graphite pigments and colored inks that differed from the darkness and composition of inks counterfeiters usually had available, and his inks may have been more stable in color over time. He developed the threads of color in the paper, watermarks, and grainy, translucent fillers, like powdered mica to establish a gloss. Some of his efforts also made the paper more durable. One of his bills just “felt” right. As his methods changed over time, counterfeiters were forced to keep innovating too.

Counterfeit “detectors” and a good eye helped colonists steer clear of bogus bills. Cashiers who run your $20 under a UV light are following a long, venerable tradition!

Skeletal leaf photo by Mark Longair and Ben Franklin photo by Ervins Strauhmanis; both with Creative Commons license 2.0 Generic licenses.

On the Big Screen: American Fiction

The entertaining film American Fiction is about Black author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison whose highbrow works don’t sell (trailer). As a piece of literary sarcasm, he deploys a pseudonym (Stagg R. Lee) and the persona of a fugitive from justice to pen a novel full of gangsta stuff—shootings, drugs, unknown daddies, you name it. Frustratingly, this pile of clichés, which he regards as trash, is snatched up by a publisher. A big-budget movie deal is in the works.

It seems Americans (book publishers, movie-makers, consumers) are much more willing to accept that depiction of Black life than the reality of an upbringing like Monk’s: a father and two siblings who are doctors, his life as a college instructor.

Racist attitudes about Blacks aren’t the only prejudice explored in the film. The Black family’s prejudice against white people recurs. And, Monk’s brother is a gay plastic surgeon who escaped from Massachusetts to Tucson to put a continent between himself and the homophobic attitudes of his parents.

This may sound a bit heavy, but the script (written by Cord Jefferson) has a light touch and frequent bursts of humor, even when we see our not-best selves. No matter how on-point the humor is, it’s never mean-spirited. Jefferson also directed the film, which stars Jeffrey Wright giving a vulnerable, complex performance as Ellison/Lee, Tracee Ellis Ross as his sister, Sterling K. Brown as brother Clifford, and Leslie Uggams as their widowed mother.

John Ortiz does a perfect job as Ellison’s agent, the only person in on the joke. He’s against the idea at the outset, but when it’s such a runaway financial success, he’s in. Monk is not. He wants to abandon the Stagg R. Lee project, but for various reasons, he’s increasingly stuck. Adam Brody plays the terminally clueless Hollywood producer. He thinks he’s cool with Black people, but . . .

Monk embarks on a predictable romance with public defender Coraline (Erika Alexander). It’s useful to the story, because it hits the nail home for Monk about the downsides of his disengagement with life—ironically, what his fiction suffers from too.

The many closeups of Monk—taking situations in and puzzling over them—give the impression he’s merely an observer of his life , not a participant. In one of many beautiful filmmaking moments, early on, a death occurs that Monk watches through a not-quite-closed hospital door. From down the hall, you see him silhouetted in front of the door, and when he realizes what’s happened, he slowly backs away, distancing himself from another painful reality.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 93%; audiences: 98%.

What’s Down There?

In the last few weeks, a Missouri man (described as a “YouTuber”) discovered the car and body of a man missing since 2013 in the waters of a Missouri pond. It reminded me of a New Yorker story last summer titled “Hidden Depths,” by author Rachel Monroe, who dived (sorry!) deep into this particular specialty in the true crime cold case genre—underwater crime-solving.

The story focuses on a group called Adventures with Purpose (AWP). These are volunteer salvage divers who search lakes and rivers for missing cars—sometimes long-missing, and sometimes with the drivers still in them—and share video of their results for a YouTube audience that numbers in the millions. (Yet another massive social trend I’ve completely missed.)

Jared Leisek of Oregon founded AWP in 2018 intending it to feature treasure-hunts, but found it hard to compete with other dive sites that had much bigger audiences. The next year he found two handguns in the water, and a light bulb went off. He could build a bigger audience by focusing on the cold cases and missing persons.

Once he solved the case of missing man Nathaniel Ashby (a video about the discovery has been viewed more than ten million times), AWP was deluged with requests from friends and family members of other missing people. Responses from local law enforcement cover the gamut. Some welcome the help they can’t afford and the resources (dive equipment, trained divers) they don’t have; other not so much. Cause-of-death also varies. Many of the cases are the result of accident or suicide, but some may be actual crimes.

Interestingly, Leisek told Monroe he hates the true-crime community. Perhaps because of its voyeuristic love of sensationalism can lead to excess. As Monroe said, the true-crime fandom has “a tendency to assume that the official story of a tragic death obscures a more horrific reality.”

(Naturally, in the “no secret is secret for long” in the social mediaverse, AWP is criticized on numerous fronts and long-ago accusations that the teenage Leisek raped his cousin emerged, which at least for a time resulted in lost viewership for his YouTube channel.)

The Missouri case was resolved through the work of independent investigator James Hinkle, a local videographer who has his own YouTube channel, Echo Divers. Although there’s room for abuses here, the families Monroe interviewed are grateful that their days of wondering can come to a close.

Photo by Aviv Perets

Weekend Movies: Two Good Choices, One Not-So

popcorn

If a Black Friday shopping frenzy has you wanting to get off your feet for a couple hours in a darkened movie theater, here are some of your choices.

The Holdovers
This comedy-drama, directed by Alexander Payne, is head and shoulders above recent formulaic comedies I’ve seen (trailer). It’s the story of the students—actually one student—left behind at a New England prep school’s holiday break, so has the added benefit of seasonality. A disliked classics teacher is assigned to supervise, and a Black kitchen supervisor is there to make sure the two eat.

The performances of Paul Giamatti as the teacher, newcomer Dominic Sessa as the student, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the most sensible of the trio animate David Hemingson’s script. Scenes with the other students are adolescent boyhood on full display. But mostly, it’s the three of them. You can just relax and enjoy it.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 96%; audiences 92%.

Nyad
One of those feel-good sports biopics that leaves you in awe (trailer). Diana Nyad became famous in her early career for her long-distance swimming accomplishments, but what has haunted her for decades is the event where she failed: Cuba to Florida, 110 miles. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s adept movie shows how Nyad at age 60 decides to train and pick up that challenge again.

Annette Bening prepared for the role by swimming four to five hours a day for a year and does most of the swimming in the film. You might think watching someone swim, day and night, might not be that riveting, but in the movie the actual swimming is interspersed with scenes from her close friendship with her coach, played by Jodie Foster, and the crew of her boat, captained by its irascible captain, played by Rhys Ifans. And there are plenty of dangers in this endeavor, physical and emotional.

I thought the film was great, and the showing at my local theater was followed by a q-and-a with the director. She said that uppermost in their minds making the film was to convey Nyad’s complexity as a person, and Bening and Foster help them do that every step of the way. Oh, and two words you never want to hear linked together again: Box Jellyfish.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 85%; audiences 82%.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

What a disappointment! Joan Baez’s parents kept all her early tapes, her interviews, her journals and artwork, family photos, etc., etc., in a storage unit, and Baez made it available to filmmakers Miri Navasky, Karen O’Connor, and Maeve O’Boyle (trailer). Of all the interesting things they might have conveyed about this amazing artist, what did they cherry-pick out of these riches? Tapes of her with a creepy-sounding therapist, her anxiety and depression as revealed in her letters, her drawings done under hypnosis (maybe, not clear) or through guided imagery that make her think she has a multiple personality disorder, excerpts from her baffled mother’s letters, and the vaguest possible hints she might have been an abuse victim. While these factors are no doubt important in her personal history, they dominate the film.

Baez is not only a remarkable singer, she is a compassionate and interesting person who has done important work. Prepared to be uplifted, when this movie ended, I was exhausted and depressed. I don’t understand the raves. She deserved So Much Better! (It’s also streaming.)

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 98%; audiences: 85%

Expanding Crime Fiction Awards

Like the Mystery Writers of America and other US groups, the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association issues annual awards for the “best” books in various categories. The awards, called Daggers are numerous, but unlike most award programs divide into the form of the submission—paperback original, debut, nonfiction, etc.—this program has separate awards for espionage (plus, oddly, psychological and adventure thrillers) and historical. It makes sense to carve out certain topics because, really, how do you compare books across a field with such diverse tropes and traditions? An excellent police procedural—I’m thinking Harry Bosch— or gritty thriller can’t easily be compared to a cozy mystery, where there isn’t much blood, the murders occur off-stage, and the protagonist runs a cupcake shop.

Next year, the UK Association’s boffins are bowing to market pressure and adding two new categories to its list of awards: the Twisted Dagger for psychological thrillers—think Gone Girl and Ruth Ware—and the Whodunnit Dagger for cozy (or as the Brits have it, cosy) crime. The latter became almost inevitable when Richard Osman’s novel, The Last Devil to Die, part of his series that began with The Thursday Murder Club, became the fastest-selling hardcover novel by a British author in UK history.

Readers of the UK Website CrimeFictionLover.com (for which I write book reviews) currently may vote on their favorite books of the last year, nominated by other readers. This is the third year for these readers’ choice awards, and voting ends 4 December. This award program has a separate category for “Indie” publication, by which they mean smaller publishers and self-published.

Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar awards categories for novels take into account the different ways books are published today and age group of intended audience, but don’t distinguish among content subgenres. However, US authors of cozy mysteries can compete against works more generally in that category through the Agatha Awards, a project of the Malice Domestic conference. And for private-eye novels, there are the Shamus Awards. And the . . .

The plethora of awards may seem a bit confusing (and it is), but the difference in tastes reflected by these different approaches to recognizing excellence helps authors and their books more easily find their niche and their audience.

Given that I read about 90 books a year, I’m frequently dismayed at how few of the winners I’ve actually read! But when I’m looking for a great audio book, the lists of finalists are where I start.

Killers of the Flower Moon

You think three hours and 26 minutes makes for an awfully long movie? You’re right. Yet, Martin Scorsese’s true-crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, completely held my attention throughout (trailer). Even though I knew the story, because I’d read the fascinating book by David Grann that the movie is based on, still there were no saggy lulls. It is time well spent.

The New York Times calls it “An Unsettling Masterpiece,” which recounts the terrible outcomes of white men’s unrelenting, murderous greed when oil is quite unexpectedly discovered on the Oklahoma lands that had been considered so worthless they might as well be given to the Osage tribe.

If I had a complaint, it would be that there was too much attention to Robert DeNiro as the “King of the Osage Hills,” cattleman William Hale. (Hale even asks people to call him “King.”) He gives an excellent performance, but, unlike the other characters, he doesn’t change; he’s the same throughout—a malicious, manipulative, avaricious local operator—and you understand him from the beginning.

Leonardo DiCaprio sets aside any vanity and is neither handsome nor savvy in playing Ernest Burkhart, Hale’s nephew. Because the tribe members are deemed incompetent to manage their assets, they are required to have white guardians. A quick way for a white man to become a guardian is to marry an Osage woman, just as Burkhart marries Mollie Kyle, memorably played by Lily Gladstone. Then if the wife dies . . . you can guess the rest.

Thanks to the oil, in the early 1920s, Osage members were the per capita richest people in the world. Much too tempting a target for undereducated, unprincipled roughnecks. Believe me, you’re grateful when Jesse Pelmons as Tom White, an agent of J.Edgar Hoover’s nascent FBI, appears on the scene.

The movie was filmed on a grand scale in Oklahoma, though there are plenty of intimate, emotion-packed moments in which Mollie and Ernest demonstrate real love for each other. Her penetrating gaze recognizes Hale and Burkhart’s schemes, but loves her husband anyway.

The film is dedicated to Robbie Robertson, whose last project was composing its music.

At the beginning, there is what seems an unnecessary statement by Scorsese about why he made this movie. That opening fits when he gives its closing words as well, bookending the film during a creative approach to telling “what happened next.”

The ill-treatment of indigenous people was one of America’s two greatest original sins and, in the arc of history, this sorry episode was not so very long ago.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 93%; audiences: 85%.

Another Halloween Story

pumpkin, book art

Lois Wehre and her tuxedo cat Frankie lived in Grovers’ Mill, New Jersey, where Orson Welles set his Halloween radio broadcast about Martians landing, and where, to this day, Halloween is a big deal. Her house is Ground Zero for tourists, thanks to local teens who once attached a lighted “flying saucer” to her garage roof. Lois grew up in Missouri. Her father was a mean drunk who lorded it over Lois and her weak-willed mother, and worse. They made Lois’s life miserable. When the house burned down one night as her mother and father slept, Lois took her inheritance and moved across country. Some adult children just shouldn’t live with their parents.

  • * * *

The wind-whipped whiff of smoke in the air, the flame-colored leaves, the shrieks of the children. Lois forgot to smile at the diminutive superheroes and frothy pink princesses who greedily plunged their hands deep into the candy bowl. “One piece,” she said, unheeded.

The night thickened, and the older kids would start arriving soon. They’d gather outside, trapping her in the house. Not this year. She turned off the lights and, clad head-to-toe in black, a dark scarf hooding her face, slipped out the back door. When she stood motionless at the inky corner of the hedge, she could watch over her house, invisible.

Soon a clutch of twelve-year-old boys walked up to the front porch and pounded on the door.

“Nobody home.”

“That old bitch,” one said in a voice that hadn’t changed yet.

“C’mon.”

They slipped around the side of the house. Giggling and mock-shoving, they gathered in a tight circle, blocking the wind. A match flared, and the tip of a cigarette glowed as a boy sucked on it, then passed it to his friend. The match, dropped absent-mindedly, fell in an arcing pinpoint of yellow light.

“You sure she’s not home?”

“Danny, she’s not. Dare you to go inside.”

“No way.”

“Chicken.” The boy giggled and took a drag on the joint.

“I will if you will,” another said.

“Let’s go.”

As the jostling boys sneaked into the back yard, a cache of dry leaves hidden under the rhododendrons began to flame.

“Wait,” Lois called, her warning carried away by a gust. She shot out of her hiding place as flames touched the base of the wooden porch. “Frankie!” she shrieked and ran toward the house.

Two older teenagers, football players by the intimidating heft of them, stepped in front of her. They were dressed all in black, too. She hadn’t seen them. The taller one wore sunglasses that made his eyes as fathomless as those of the pseudo-aliens decorating her neighbors’ lawns.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“The house is on fire! My cat!”

“What’s your hurry? It’s just a few dead leaves.”

She tried to dodge around them, but with one side-step they easily blocked someone her size. She shoved. They stood immobile, menacing.

“Please let me by. I have to—hurry!—” Her heart pounded. They didn’t understand how fast fire could move. One end of the porch was burning, and before long, the flames would reach the front door.

“Cats have nine lives.” The shorter teen snickered.

Lois tried again to shove her way between them, but they stood solidly shoulder-to-shoulder, teasing her. “Let me by!” She panted her words. “My neighbors will have seen the fire by now. You’d better get out of here.”

“Plenty of time. Hear anything?” the tall one asked. The other shook his head and grinned.

And, indeed, it was eerily quiet, except for the crackling flames. The rose trellis at the end of the porch sparkled with raining cinders. Shrieks of hilarity came from inside the darkened house.

“Those boys, they have to get out!” She gestured violently. “They’ll die in there.”

The teenagers glanced over their shoulders. “Hey, assholes!” the tall one yelled. “Get out of there. What’re you doing?”

The only answer was more high-pitched laughter.

“I think your little brother’s with them,” the other said. They turned and in long strides reached the porch, the flames licking toward them. They shoved open the front door. “You kids get the hell out. The house is on fire, you morons. Danny, if you’re in there, I’m going to—”

Lois ducked past them, but the tall one grabbed her arm. A column holding up one end of the porch roof collapsed, and the corner of the roof followed in sagging slow motion. Inside, the kids screamed and raced past her, nearly knocking her down. The teenager let go of her arm.

“Danny? Danny! Where is he?” he yelled at the boys.

The children glanced at each other. “He was with us a minute ago.”

“In the kitchen,” said another.

“No, he wasn’t!”

Lois ran to the back of the house and almost tripped on a still form. She turned on the overhead light. The boy was unconscious beneath an open cabinet door. “Must of cracked his head,” she muttered. She picked him up—heavy for her—and called, “Frankie! Frankie!”

A child where he wasn’t supposed to be, just like her daughter Kaye, where she wasn’t supposed to be, the night of that other fire. Kaye had a sleepover, but the girls quarreled after dinner, and Kaye came home while Lois was in the back yard, putting out water for the chickens. She never knew Kaye was there until the firemen carried out the third body.

Danny’s weight caused her to stagger a little. Frankie dashed between her legs, nearly tripping her as she reached the open back door. Being allowed outside at night was a rare treat, and Frankie wouldn’t miss this chance. He flew off the steps.

The teenagers arrived at the bottom of the stoop just as she did, and she handed them Danny like a gift. Then they heard the sirens.

A Man for All Seasons

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, directed by Paul Mullins, opened October 21 and runs through November 5, 2023. The story of Sir Thomas More, a man who not only has principles but sticks to them, seems a timely offering for our more elastic era. Of course, you may conclude that, in his case, that virtue went too far. Here a strong cast and excellent production provide much to consider.

Hewing closely to history, More (played by Thomas Michael Hammond) has become the Chancellor of England during the reign of Henry VIII (Roger Clark). Henry is determined to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. He has several reasons for this, but the most powerful may be that she has failed to produce a male heir. (Centuries later, science would prove that a child’s sex is determined by the father. Henry should have been looking in the mirror.) The Catholic Church, of course, opposes the divorce, and Spanish officialdom, represented by its emissary Sigñor Chapuys (Edward Furst), regularly pleads Catherine’s cause. More’s conscience won’t let him support the King’s plans, despite the loyalty he demonstrates by various other actions. Nor does he speak out against them.

The principal cast includes several additional notable characters, which the cast plays with great skill and gusto: the always a bit dodgy Duke of Norfolk (Anthony Marble), More’s devoted wife Alice (Mary Stillwaggon Stewart), his daughter Margaret (Brianna Martinez) and her fiancé William Roper (Ty Lane), whose political views shift with every wind. Also, rising politician Richard Rich (Aaron McDaniel) demonstrates his convincing slipperiness, Thomas Cromwell is less admirable here than in Wolf Hall (James McMenamin), and “The Common Man,” (Kevin Isola). Isola makes the most of the array of often-comic characters he plays—More’s servant Matthew, a boatman, a publican, a juror, a jailer. His every appearance is welcome. Additional cast and production credits in my review at TheFrontRowCenter.

In general, a readiness to compromise or to achieve the King’s desired ends by whatever argument necessary characterizes Rich, Norfolk, and Cromwell, in direct contrast to More. The play challenges you to think about the role of a counselor. Is it solely to follow the leader’s dicta or is it to help a leader onto a more conciliatory and constructive path? For all his staunch refusals to speak out on the era’s great questions—the divorce and the establishment of the Church of England with the King at its head—More does have opinions about these matters. He simply believes his silence will protect him from accusations of treason. In my view, he’s splitting legal hairs too.

STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.