| . | 06/01/2009
A More Perfect Union
By: Edward Lieberman
With serendipitous timing, the Epic Theater Ensemble has mounted the World Premier production of A More Perfect Union, a back story “expose” of what goes on behind the bench at the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, the author of this play about one of this country’s iconic institutions is Vern Theissen, the prominent Canadian playwright, who is a recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, for Einstein’s Gift.
The play is billed as a “serious comedy” about a love affair between two clerks to ideologically opposed Justices of the High Court. Maddie, a white Jewish woman from the Midwest, clerks for the most conservative Justice on the Court, who she dubs “The Wise One.” James, an African-American from Atlanta, clerks for the most liberal Justice on the Court, “The Enlightened One.” (The other Justices are predictably referred to as, among others, “The Ancient One” [“he wasn’t sleeping; he was thinking!”], “the Courteous One” and “the Efficient One”). They form an unlikely alliance to lighten their workload by agreeing between them which cases to recommend to their Justices to be heard by the Court. (We learn that the Supreme Court only hears cases they want to hear; it takes four Justices to grant “cert” to hear a case before it will make it onto the Court’s calendar.). Their relationship gradually deepens from suspicion, to playful banter, to . . . well, you get the picture. But this plot device is secondary to the play’s more serious commentary on the Court and the characters that make the “real” decisions thereon (or under).
Eschewing the typical dramatic focus on the larger-than-life personalities of the Justices themselves and the cases they hear, Mr. Theissen’s play focuses on the often overlooked fact that the Justices make far more decisions by refusing to hear cases than they do on the relatively few cases they deign to hear. And these decisions are left, in the first instance, to the heroes of the piece: their clerks!
According to the play, the real power rests with them and the influence they have over their Justices (indeed, they call themselves “the Junior Court”). In effect, the clerks disdain their bosses, averring that they, better than their bosses (many of whom have been on the Court for decades), can understand the “context” of the cases whose merit they are themselves deciding.
The play focuses on two cases to convey the feeling that the law “must live out there.” James persuades Maddie to agree to recommend that her conservative Justice agree to hear the case of a black man who is appealing his death penalty for brutally murdering his abusive father, because, as a black man, no one heard his complaints or saw the pain that led to the crime. Maddie persuades James to recommend that his liberal Justice agree to hear the appeal of a Catholic school whose firing of a single woman who worked for the school as a janitor when she became pregnant was overturned by the lower court because of the protection afforded her by the Pregnancy Protection Act. In the end, almost as an afterthought, the play reveals that in both cases the Clerks’ foresight in urging their Justices to hear what originally seemed to be open-and-shut denials of cert were rewarded with decisions of the High Court overturning the lower courts’ decisions, declaring that the Clerks, themselves, were responsible for the final decision. And they accomplish all this while, at the same time, facing possible ruin as the result of secrets in their past and present which the reviewer will not reveal here.
The play is ably served by its cast of two talented actors, Melissa Friedman and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., whose performances run the gamut from playful flirtation to eloquence when quoting precedents and making mock legal arguments. The spare set of Troy Hourie focuses the attention of the audience where it belongs – on the actors and the law – as does the lighting by Tyler Micoleau and costumes by Theresa Squire. Director Ron Russell keeps it taut and focused.
The play is true to Epic’s self-described mission of making its productions an educational experience and one which is a “collective experience that inspires discussion and spurs action.” In it we learn some of the inner workings of the Court, such as the process by which the Court decides which cases it hears, as well as the interactions among its members, although one suspects that its protagonists have somewhat less influence on the Justices than described herein.
One of the valuable attributes of Epic productions is the Q & A session Epic conducts after each performance, with, in this case, former Supreme Court Law Clerks and/or prominent attorneys. In the session after the show viewed by this reviewer, for example, it was disclosed that unlike the love affair artifice that was the dramatic device employed by the playwright, in fact it is the Justices that cultivate social contacts with each other (after all, they will be serving together for years, if not decades), while their clerks, who serve only for one or two years and are passionately devoted to the judicial philosophy of their Justice, often despise each other and sometimes, even, come to blows!
The point of the play is to be found in its final line: “There is no wrong in the law; only different pictures.” With the recent pronouncement of President Obama that he would seek to nominate Justices to the Supreme Court with “empathy,” and his seeming deliverance on such promise by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who, as we now know (and those who don’t will surely learn) once famously said that she thought that “a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” the play’s examination of the role of “context” in the decisions of the High Court has taken on greater importance than could have been anticipated by the Ensemble when it decided to mount this production. One can only hope that with the change in circumstances caused by Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, the limited run of this thoughtful production, which is scheduled to end on June 7th, will be extended to continue during Ms. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings!
A More Perfect Union is produced by the Epic Theater Ensemble, at the East 13th Street Theater, 136 E. 13th Street. Performances are currently scheduled to continue through June 7th.
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