Notes From Underground

In 1953, Dalton Trumbo found himself in a particularly sticky predicament. Not that he was new to sticky predicaments: One of the most respected and highly paid Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s, with a string of hits -- including Tender Comrade starring Ginger Rogers and the Spencer Tracy vehicles A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo -- to his name, Trumbo had in 1947 been indicted along with nine other actors and writers, collectively dubbed the "Hollywood Ten," for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo went to prison, after which he was blacklisted by the studio system. Unable to find work and beset by mounting debts, he spent the following decade writing screenplays at cut-rate prices under pseudonyms, sometimes asking other writers to act as "fronts" by lending their names to his scripts in order to sell them.

But in 1953, when one of these fronts unexpectedly died while Trumbo and his family were living in self-imposed exile in Mexico City, Trumbo was faced with the unenviable task of convincing the deceased writer's family to give him -- a stranger who had served time in a federal prison, been shunned by the movie industry, and was living in Mexico to boot -- the profits on the sale of a screenplay that didn't even bear his name on the cover. To most, this would seem an impossible feat, but as luck would have it, the man who could reputedly turn out a fully polished 150-page Hollywood script in a week was also an extremely persuasive letter writer.

Christopher Trumbo -- the writer's son, now in his 60s -- reveals his father's epistolary genius in his own play, Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted. Based on some 13 years of correspondence between the senior Trumbo and a wide array of recipients, ranging from family members and fellow writers to the principal of his daughter's elementary school and an employee at a local telecommunications company, Trumbo not only paints an affectionate portrait of a remarkable writer and an outspoken human being, but also refocuses our attention on a murky period of 20th-century American history.

Whether outlining his uncompromising political views (as a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1940s, Trumbo believed in freedom, brotherhood, and the struggle against Fascism, but he didn't care much about Marx; as a screenwriter he campaigned fervently for union rights), griping about cash-flow problems, or explaining the delights of masturbation to his college-age son, Trumbo combined in his vivid correspondence the stern rhetoric of, say, Winston Churchill with dangerous Lenny Bruce-style wit. Even as creditors breathed down his neck and right-wing America denounced him, the writer maintained his wicked sense of humor. "I have received your letter warning that I am now in jeopardy of being placed in bad standing for non-payment of dues," wrote Trumbo to the treasurer of the Screenwriters' Guild during the blacklist period. "I thought it rather loud and more than ordinarily witless, but to deny you these qualities would be to silence you altogether; and that, for constitutional reasons alone, I should not like to see happen."

Samuel Johnson thought plays were better read in private than staged in front of an audience. The reverse and equally eccentric idea, of making letters -- usually intended for the eyes of a solitary reader -- the subject of a public performance, often yields unsatisfactory results. Take Jerome Kilty's 1957 two-person piece Dear Liar, for instance. Built around the clandestine correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and his actress muse, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the play's dreary narration and lengthy chunks of regurgitated letter-reading seem to suck all the sparkle out of what must originally have been a fiery affaire de plume. In another example, Aileen Atkins' 1992 play Vita & Virginia, about the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, infuses the correspondence-based text with some semblance of dramatic action, but the stiffness of the staging still inhibits any real conflict or conversation.