At Victory Gardens Theater in Lincoln Park, Relentless Theatre Group’s production of David Mamet’s Henry Johnson falls short despite an intriguing concept and plentiful cynicism. During the tight hour and a half (including an absurdly unnecessary intermission), the fall of middle-aged Henry Johnson plays out. It begins when Johnson is ensnared and arrested for attempting to illegally aid a college friend in his trial for rape and murder. In jail, Johnson again falls prey to a purported ally—his cellmate convinces Johnson to use the prison doctor to smuggle a gun into the jail. For hapless Johnson, it’s only further downhill from there.
It should be stated up front that Mamet—among America’s most famous playwrights—has come under criticism in recent years for his politics. In 2022, the Glengarry Glen Ross author told Fox News’s Mark Levin that “teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.” Mamet has also publicly questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. On the night this reviewer attended Henry Johnson, 20 protesters stood outside in the rain demanding to know why Victory Gardens Theater had chosen to produce the work of an unabashedly conservative playwright.
This play is, if not politically conservative, certainly aesthetically so. Despite innovative material—a simple yet smart arrangement of scenes, the bizarre plot to get Johnson a gun—the play as a whole feels a couple decades past due. And despite Mamet’s willingness to frankly present human beings’ proclivity for profanity and gross sexuality, Henry Johnson rambles right past discussions of rape, abortion, and sin. (Mamet has also been accused of misogyny in his writing; this play does not shy away from men abusing and exploiting women.)
Victory Gardens’s production does the script few favors. Mamet’s dialogue is famously dense, complex, and philosophical, and—unaugmented by changes in blocking and lighting in Henry Johnson—often falls flat. Edward Torres’s direction struggles to unite a play split cleanly into four very different two-person scenes. And, during clunky transitions and the aforementioned unnecessary intermission, Henry Johnson loses the momentum it has built—and the sense of inevitability that the tragic helplessness of its titular character creates.
That is not to say that Henry Johnson is uninteresting, merely that it is most interesting at first glance and somewhat lacking after. Mamet has crafted a touching, if pessimistic, story about a man who is so blinded by his need to be liked that, to his death, he doesn’t realize everyone around him is playing him for a fool. “You are the little boy and she’s the ice cream vendor in this seduction,” Henry’s cellmate Gene remarks of the former’s relationship to his prison doctor. Gene is, of course, also taking advantage of Henry.
And Henry, blind to it all, comes across as the victim—but the victim of his own childlike daze. Daniil Krimer, as Johnson, says very little, though he is the only member of a four-person cast who is present in every scene. He mostly sits there, on a little metal excuse for a bench, acting through his gut and shoulders. Krimer, as he sweats, wipes his brow with an ugly brown-and-red-striped tie. He paces. “What should I do?” he asks prison guard Jerry (an able Keith Kupferer). “Do what you want,” Jerry replies. “People generally do.” And yet Henry does not know what he wants.
Krimer is, as Henry, rather intentionally outshone by Thomas Gibson, of Criminal Minds fame, as Gene. Gene, already imprisoned for who-knows-what, reels Henry and the audience in with a series of oily, rolling monologues on gender, wisdom, and justice. Mamet is, in this reeling-in and throughout Henry Johnson, precise and unsparing in his criticism of society’s quiet acquiescence to sin, though he could stand at times to be more overt in the rendering of his judgment.
On the whole, Henry Johnson has an almost there quality to it. The set is intriguing but a little too perfect in its supposed disarray. The final image of each act is moving but not quite permitted to settle. The dialogue, though witty, is too frequently left empty by a production lacking consistent style. There are payoffs, certainly, in Henry Johnson—chiefly a realization at the end of the first scene as to the nature of Henry’s situation and a long, unsettling Snow White allegory delivered by Gene—but they cannot make up for a play that fails to sufficiently ensnare. Like Henry Johnson, the audience is pulled in, then left confused, charmed, then left to die.
Relentless Theatre Group’s production of David Mamet’s Henry Johnson is at Victory Gardens Theater through May 4.
