STORMY SEAS
Judson Theatre Company presents The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
by Jim Moriarty
Herman Wouk, the author of both the novel The Caine Mutiny and the play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, took great pains to let his audience know that nothing that happened aboard the fictional ship the USS Caine occurred in the very real campaigns he experienced during his World War II service in the Pacific Theater. A note to the play says, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is purely imaginary. No ship named U.S.S. Caine ever existed. The records show no instance of a U.S. Navy captain relieved at sea under Articles 184-186. The fictitious figure of the deposed captain was derived from a study of psychoneurotic case histories, and is not a portrait of a real military person or a type; this statement is made because of the existing tendency to seek lampoons of living people in imaginary stories. The author served under two captains of the regular Navy aboard destroyer-minesweepers, both of whom were decorated for valor.”
The Judson Theatre Company will bring Wouk’s courtroom drama, informed by his service aboard the USS Zane and USS Southard, to life in five performances starring John Wesley Shipp and David A. Gregory, beginning Thursday, April 24, and running through Sunday, April 27, in BPAC’s Owens Auditorium, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. The novel, published in 1951 in a wave of post-war literature that included books like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, earned Wouk a Pulitzer Prize. The play debuted on Broadway in January 1954, directed by Charles Laughton. That June the movie The Caine Mutiny was released, gaining seven Oscar nominations, including one for best actor for Humphrey Bogart’s riveting performance as Lt. Com. Philip Francis Queeg.
The play is performed in two acts, organized simply with the first act as the prosecution and the second the defense. “If you think about the film and even the book, they both literalize what happened on the ship,” says Judson Theatre’s executive producer, Morgan Sills. “With the play, the audience gets to piece together what happened on the ship from what they glean from all the different testimony they hear. In the end, the audience has a job to do, to decide what they believe is the real story. And that’s theatrically interesting. It can change from night to night the way that live performances change from night to night and books and films do not.”
Shipp, who returns to Judson Theatre after playing the role Juror No. 8 in its 2016 production of 12 Angry Men — Henry Fonda’s part in the 1957 movie — takes the part of Queeg, the ship’s commander relieved of duty during a vicious storm by Lt. Stephen Maryk. He’s played by Jacob Pressley, whose Judson summer theater festival credits include Gutenberg! The Musical, The Last Five Years and They’re Playing Our Song. Maryk’s defense counsel is Lt. Barney Greenwald, played by Gregory. Coincidentally, Fonda played Greenwald in the original Broadway production.
Though tasked with defending Maryk, Greenwald has no particular fondness for his client. On the other hand, he knows that in order to perform his sworn duty to zealously represent him, he will have to cross-examine Queeg in the most brutal manner, a prospect that gives Greenwald no pleasure. At its dramatic height Greenwald and Queeg go head-to-head. And it’s there that Judson’s production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial benefits from the long working relationship between Shipp and Gregory.
In his role as Eddie Ford on One Life to Live, Shipp — whose credits and awards (including two Emmys) over a 38-year acting career are too numerous to mention — was frequently at loggerheads with Gregory, who played his son, Robert, on the daytime drama. “I was the abusive father and he was my oldest son, Bobby Ford,” says Shipp. “I had three sons and I treated them all differently. Bobby was the one who would push back. We had a great time. It’s just one more reason I’m so excited to get on stage going head-to-head with this man because I know how talented he is, how resourceful he is. The thing I love about David is he brings his A game all the time. I feel like we challenged each other.”
Moving at the speed of a soap opera, between scenes Shipp and Gregory would occasionally swap their character’s lines if they thought it deepened the connection. “We have a shorthand with each other, working 15-16 years ago on the soap where we would have to clash,” says Gregory. “We know what that territory is, but we haven’t experienced it with this play and these words.”
One Life to Live isn’t their only collaboration. Gregory wrote a scripted podcast, Powder Burns, about a blind sheriff in the Old West. It premiered on Apple Podcasts in 2015 with Shipp in the role of the sheriff. Critically acclaimed, it earned Gregory a Voice Arts Award in 2017. They’ve also worked together on a two-person play Gregory wrote about Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda called Hank & Jim Build a Plane, which Shipp and Gregory performed in a workshop in New Orleans in 2018, the last time they appeared on stage together. As opposed to their One Life to Live personas, Hank & Jim is about two men, famous for their shared model airplane hobby, who are at odds with one another over pretty much everything else — including a woman — and who won’t, or can’t, challenge one another. In something of a metaphor for our time, it’s about what Hank and Jim, sharing the same tiny garage space, can’t say to one another. “It may have been Jimmy Stewart’s daughter who said the interesting thing you’ve done is that you’ve taken two men of very few words and written what they would have said to each other if they could have,” says Shipp.
Finding the right words won’t be the problem in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. “Plays like this get done so often because they’re very, very good,” says Gregory. “The author has meticulously made this as perfect as possible. We just get to add on top of that. It’s a blast.”
Shipp sees only one real drawback: “My only complaint is that it’s too short.”