HUMANISING TIMOTHY MCVEIGH

Edmund White has written a powerful play about Timothy McVeigh, sensing some method in the man's violent madness. "Terre Haute" ends its off-Broadway run in New York this weekend. Emily Bobrow speaks with the playwright ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Timothy McVeigh, an American Army veteran, is America's most famous home-grown terrorist. In 1995 he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men, women and children. He was angry. He was angry at the government after serving in the first Iraq war. He was angry about what happened in Waco, Texas, exactly two years earlier, when the government killed more than 70 Branch Davidian cult members. He was striking back, though he was surprised to learn that so many children were in the building.

McVeigh had “declared war on a government that he felt had declared war on its own people,” wrote Gore Vidal in a long, sympathetic essay in Vanity Fair months after his execution in June 2001. The two men had actually corresponded for some three years. McVeigh initiated the relationship after reading an article of Vidal's that bristled with a familiar bitterness (it bewailed “the shredding of our Bill of Rights”). He even asked Vidal to witness his lethal injection, though the author couldn’t make it from Italy in time. The regard was apparently mutual.

This bizarre camaraderie is the subject of “Terre Haute”, a spare two-person play written by Edmund White and directed by George Perrin, which first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2006. After a London tour, the production has moved to 59E59, a modest Manhattan theatre on the Upper East Side, where it has been enjoying critical acclaim and a steady following. It closes this weekend.

On a dark minimalist set meant to evoke death row, White has invented a meeting that never happened between the misguided fanatic and the jaded gadfly. The result is fictionalised enough to warrant new names (“Harrison” for McVeigh, “James” for Vidal), and powerful enough to make its taut 80 minutes crackle with alacrity.

Terre Haute “It’s sort of like a first date,” chuckles Harrison (Nick Westrate) while pacing his fenced cell in an orange jumpsuit. It is days before he will be put to death, and he is eager to get his story into the right hands. “The only reason that could justify me killing so many people and losing my own life now is getting my message out. And you’re the only one who can do that,” he says to James (Peter Eyre), who sits cross-legged on a chair just beyond the wire grate, with a bemused expression and a tape recorder.

After years of letters, their patter in person is awkward, energised and occasionally defensive. Both worry about disappointing the other. “I want him to like me,” James confesses to the audience in the play’s first moments, as he leans his fragile frame against his cane. Harrison needs someone to redeem his seemingly nonsensical acts--a Homer to his Achilles ("All I care about is your words—what you’re going to say about me"). James craves release from his “elegant and dull” life, full of paid homosexual sex and anxieties about death. He is clearly drawn to Harrison, achingly. “Are all sociopaths so charming? So clever at appealing to an old man’s vanity?” he muses, disarmed. Their dance is well choreographed, a constant trade in power and vulnerability.

Eyre is wonderful as James, a rarefied, Europeanised intellectual, both haughty and self-conscious. He does such remarkable things with his face--a subtle twitch or switch of gaze revealing a wealth of restrained tumult. He totters on knock-knees yet gesticulates proudly, a mixture of lofty self-parody and palpable loneliness. “I would love to write another play for him,” White told me over the phone, in awe of Eyre's performance. As for Westrate, though a relative lightweight, he captures Harrison’s lit fuse. His gaze moves from vacant to pointed with unnerving speed.

The dynamic between the two men is fascinating, particularly for the way it makes both characters seem both sympathetic and pathetic. "What I haven't brought up because I've been so besotted by you is the violence you created and the lives you took," James says. "What about all the people you killed?" Though incisive, this squeamishness about Harrison’s crime feels sudden and compensatory.

Vidal has publicly complained about this thinly veiled depiction, threatening legal action. But White has insisted that Vidal signed off on the script three years ago. And anyway, he said the James character is based more on himself--his own predilections, his own fears of aging. (“We’re both on death row,” James tells Harrison.)

Back when White was developing the script at Sundance, a judge burst into angry tears, declaring that she didn’t want McVeigh to be humanised. “I responded that if that’s the case you wouldn’t be able to deal with Macbeth,” White said. “Americans have fallen into a good guy/bad guy attitude, but the function of art is to expand our horizons.”

Picture credit: nabokov-online (via Flickr)

(Emily Bobrow is editor of More Intelligent Life, and a New York-based contributor to The Economist's Books and Arts section.)