For the past sixteen years, Christian Levatino has been running the Gangbusters Theater Company which, as its moniker suggests, specializes in plays done in comic-book fashion. Levatino, who writes and directs the plays, has built a fairly sizable cult following. Although I don’t normally like comic-book plays (or movies), I did decide to go see two of the three plays culled from his “Black Bag Pentalogy,” King Dick and …Meantime at Hojo’s. They’ve been running, with a break, since October, in rep with Sunny Afternoon (which I was not able to cover). What links these plays is their content: each depicts a recent seminal dark moment in American history. Sunny Afternoon deals with the interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald by a Dallas Homicide Detective; Hojo’s deals with the Watergate break-in; King Dick with Elvis Presley’s visit to President Nixon at Christmastime in 1970. I found myself laughing at the latter play and pretty much enjoying it, even though it did wear out its welcome over its two-hour length. Less would have been more when it came to watching an addled Presley (L.Q. Victor) and Nixon (Jeff Doba)—The King is high on drugs, the President on booze—meet together in the White House. It’s a parlous time in Nixon’s regime: the Soviets are on the moon, the Viet Nam war is going badly, and the polls tell him that he is no longer able to attract youthful voters. Which is why he answers a cold-call from Presley and his henchmen, Jerry Schilling (Derek Manson) and Sonny West (Keith Stevenson),, and agrees to see them (it’s a great photo-op). Nixon, it turns out, loved Presley in “King Bayou” and can even sing one of its corny songs. He also admires one of the pistols the gun-happy, Ritalin-crazed, paranoiac Presley is packing. Nixon, who is equally paranoiac and unstable, keeps ranting about Daniel Ellsberg and the Jewish Conspiracy, but in his calmer, lucid moments agrees to give Presley what he desperately desires: a Federal Narcotics Agent Badge. That no such badge exists doesn’t matter: Tricky Dick’s White House cronies, Bud Krogh (Andy Hirsch) and Dwight Chapin (Patrick Flanagan), will create one and send Presley off to Graceland happy in the knowledge that now he can never be busted for being a drug addict. Weaving in and out of Presley’s consciousness is yet another bizarre character, Elvis’ dead brother Jesse (Darrett Sanders), who usually wears a Captain America costume and shouts “Shazam” a lot. It’s all very manic and mad, but the lampoon works because it’s rooted in reality: such a meeting between Presley and the President did take place.
