Jamie Jackson (Photo: Russ Rowland)
Murdoch: The Final Interview
By Julia Polinsky
Whip-smart, demanding, as aggressive and changeable as Rupert Murdoch himself, this new play by An Unnamed Source hits the highlights (and lowlights) of billionaire media mogul Murdoch’s mind. Heaven knows that may not be a comfortable place to visit. Jamie Jackson’s superb performance portrays a Medusa-like nest of snakes living inside Murdoch’s head. The media figure with the single strongest impact on Western world today, Murdoch is largely responsible for who we are and how we consume media now. He knows, oh he knows, how that to play to the lowest common denominator, and Murdoch: The Final Interview pulls no punches in calling him out on it.
On the set of a tv talk show (scenic design from Peter. R. Feuchtwanger), the host Chodrum Trepur (read it backwards) preps for the interview of a lifetime. He’s about to grill Rupert Murdoch, with permission. The querulous, elderly man who dodders out on to the stage may not quite be what you expect. He is also is the 8-year-old boy trying to get his father’s attention. The left-leaning Oxford undergraduate is also the virulently conservative creator of Fox News. The teenage boy who repeats his mother’s adage, “Always tell the truth” is also the near-pornographer who sold newspapers by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Jamie Jackson, Sam Vartholomeos (Photo: Russ Rowland)
All of these Murdochs are Jamie Jackson, switching on a hair from character to character. As directed by Christopher Scott, Jackson morphs almost instantly from Trepur to Rupert to Murdoch’s cruelly remote mother and stammering father, colleagues (Roger Ailes!), political figures (JFK, for one [not Jackson’s best]), several others. Many actors can’t handle the demands of multiple roles in a one-man show (there is also a stage manager [Sam Vartholomeos]who hands Jackson props and cleans up after such items as the literal bucket marked “SHIT”). Jackson makes it look easy, switching fluidly among voices, accents, physical mannerisms.
What’s not easy: following the back-and-forth of scenes set in different times and places. Linear storytelling is simpler than understanding that an actor climbing up scaffolding is a little boy in a tree, who was just an old man, who was just a university student, who was also the host of the talk show. Also not easy: figuring out why the poem, “The Second Coming,” by W. B. Yeats, is used as a frame for the show (music by SoHee Yun; performed by pianist Isaac Hayward and sung by Sean Patrick Doyle). Perhaps the most famous apocalyptic poem in English, it speaks of things falling apart, the center not holding, the worst (people) full of passionate intensity. Implied: this is the world Murdoch has made.
Jamie Jackson (Photo: Russ Rowland)
As long as we’re mentioning literary references, the play speaks of the current president as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that Murdoch’s Fox News created but can’t control, like Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature. Yeats and Shelley: pretty heady stuff, for a 90-minute one-man show about the man who made billions off the lowest common denominator. Murdoch manipulated more people than that, though; over his career, he became a kingmaker (so to speak), buying his way into US citizenship, then paying for an end to the Fairness Doctrine and US anti-monopoly laws.
Seriously; if you’re young enough, you won’t remember a world before Murdoch, when there was a legal requirement for news to present both sides of a story. For the news actually to be fair and balanced, not just to pretend it is. Murdoch: The Final Interview will give you context galore, packed into a wild 90-minute ride.
At Theater 555
555 West 42nd St.
90 minutes, no intermission
Through December 28
