THE HOLLYWOOD ONE.("Trumbo")(Theater Review)

From the sound of it, Dalton Trumbo--the screenwriter for such movies as "Kitty Foyle," "Spartacus," "Roman Holiday," and "Papillon"--must have been one of the most divine dinner companions ever to grace God's green earth. He smoked. He was, when he wasn't typing in the bathtub (his preferred workplace), a natty dresser. He was never self-obsessed. And he had a propensity for living beyond his means, which suggests that he was probably most comfortable in the role of host, raising topics that were meant to enlighten or amuse, while tactfully steering his guests' attention away from the check. Born into an unremarkable middle-class family in Montrose, Colorado, in 1905 (he died in Los Angeles in 1976), Trumbo was a natural aristocrat who lived as if one could not and should not put a price on the supreme pleasure that life has to offer: discourse, the outgrowth of the active mind. What did it matter to this autodidact, who was as confident discussing Saint-John Perse as he was Ginger Rogers, if twelve bottles of very good wine had to be bought and consumed in order to uncork a companion's insight into this or that hitherto unknown passion? In short, Trumbo was both a sentimentalist and a snob, with more than a touch of the poet. ("I'm perfectly willing to go anywhere that I can live not, perhaps, in peace, but certainly in luxury," he once wrote to a friend.)

At least, these are some of the impressions one is left with at the close of Christopher Trumbo's moving and evocative stage portrait of his father, "Trumbo" (at the Westside). Based on a series of letters that Trumbo wrote to his family, friends, and enemies, the two-character play, starring Nathan Lane as Dalton and Gordon MacDonald as Christopher, focusses on the years from 1947 to 1960, during which time Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, was accused of Communist leanings by the House Un-American Activities Committee and banned from working in his chosen field. When he refused to name other "Communists," he was sent to prison for ten months for contempt of Congress. From his cell in Ashland, Kentucky, Trumbo wrote letters home, many of which he signed "From Daddy. Dalton Trumbo. Prisoner #7551." This was both a joke and a lesson to his wife, Cleo, and their three children. In a world where your views, political or otherwise, were punishable by law, he implied, you were no longer just a father and a husband, and you certainly couldn't afford to be a child.

Onstage, Lane reads Trumbo's letters, and MacDonald, as Christopher, provides the narration that binds them together. Christopher makes it clear that Trumbo, from the time of his right-minded, high-handed appearance before huac to his return to screenwriting under his own name in the nineteen-sixties, got by without compromising his beliefs. Delicately, he taught his children the beauty inherent in freedom of choice. "Early on, my parents decided that they would be as truthful as possible with my sisters and me," Christopher says. "There would be no secrets--not about our situation, the possibility of jail, about politics, or work." He goes on:

They told us to ask any questions we wanted. My sister Nicky was eleven, I was nine. Mitzi, only four, wasn't ready for these family briefings. Nicky and I wanted to know about Communism. It was explained to us that Communism was a system where people were provided for on the basis of "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs." Capitalism was explained as a system where one person hires a second person to perform some task and then sells the product to a third person for profit. From politics we moved on to the idea of God and the major religions. At the end of this session, my sister stoutly declared that when she grew up she would be a Communist and a Jew. More modestly, I expressed a desire to become a Capitalist and a Catholic.

A kind of West Coast ...