'Mastergate' Seeks a Summer Home in D.C.

‘Mastergate’ Seeks a Summer Home in D.C.

By JAY SHARBUTT

May 4, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — Washington may yet be the summer home of “Mastergate.”

But not at the Kennedy Center, whose general manager of theaters, Drew Murphy, found himself swimming in a flood of stories this week after the disclosure he didn’t think Larry Gelbart’s Iran-Contra satire was for the Kennedy’s Terrace Theater.

At the heart of it was whether, when he said no to producer Eugene V. Wolsk and “Mastergate,” he implied that the show’s barbed political content might somehow jeopardize the Kennedy’s future federal funding.

“Good heavens, no!” exclaimed center spokeswoman Tiki Davies.

“No,” said producer Wolsk, who plans to bring the play to Broadway this fall. “He didn’t really characterize it. He just said he didn’t think it was for them. It was a very casual thing. The incident has really been overblown.”

“It is a bit overblown, and I’m going to leave it overblown,” author Gelbart cheerfully declared, aware that an uproar over a play usually helps to publicize it. Gelbart co-created the hit CBS version of the movie “M.A.S.H.” and co-authored the hit film comedy, “Tootsie.”

Murphy himself was unavailable for an interview on the reasons for his rejection of “Mastergate.” His action first was reported Tuesday by the Washington Post.

Wolsk said American Rep officials will be talking to representatives of Washington’s Arena Stage to see if they’d like to have the show this summer.

“My interest is in having it on in Washington,” producer Wolsk said, calling the Arena venue “just as good, or maybe better” than the Kennedy.

“Mastergate,” one of three theater projects that Gelbart has been working on for several years, zings the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North, and TV coverage of hearings on the scandal (the ace correspondent here is Merry Chase of the Total News Network). It includes a plot to funnel $800 million to pro-American Central American guerrillas through a Vietnam movie epic, “Tet: The Movie.” And it’s not particularly reverent toward its genial, dense and fictional President of the United States, about whom the question is raised: “What does the President know, and does he have any idea that he knew it?”

“Mastergate” was given its premiere early this year by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., drawing a rave from the New York Times’ Frank Rich.

Kennedy spokeswoman Davies, speaking by phone from Washington, insisted Murphy’s rejection had nothing to do with the play’s content; he has neither read nor seen it.

“We were rather nonplussed by the reaction,” she said. “It was as though we had scorned the orphan at the door and sent her away.”

She pointed out that in 1985 the Kennedy staged Arthur Kopit’s “The End of the World With Symposium to Follow,” about nuclear war, generals and the way think tanks play games with the minds of citizens. The following year, it was home to Peter Sellars’ adaptation of the Greek tragedy, “Ajax,” this one set in the Pentagon and concerning Central America.

“All we care about is artistic merit,” she said, adding, “we’re not even passing judgment on (“Mastergate”), because nobody’s read a script yet.”