Off-Broadway Review: Ike Mans up in ‘Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground’

John Rubinstein in "Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground."

Photo by Maria Baranova.

A solo performance brings back America’s 1950s president, unearthing his Kansas roots, true grit and swagger. More than 60 years after his second term ended, Eisenhower’s ideals sound pretty convincing in these troubled political times. 

By Alice Garbarini Hurley

June 22, 2023

Turns out Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower (in office 1953 to 1961) was not the stuffed chair he was sometimes portrayed to be, an outdated item to whisk out of the White House, along with all signs of thrifty first lady Mamie, so Camelot could sweep in. 

The Kennedys brought visions of Harvard, suntans, sailing, white-toque chefs and Paris fashions, not to mention expensive new furnishings. And Ike’s hard-won leadership lessons, still relevant today, were almost lost, left behind.

The 34th president wasn’t Ivy League. To finance a college education without help from his beleaguered parents, he set his sights on West Point. That propelled him into an Army career, culminating as five-star general during World War II, leading the Allies. He clung to his Kansas family’s practical wisdom. His mother "had six boys in three rooms, all rotating chores--doing the laundry, hoeing the corn, milking the cow, spading the ground." When Ike tore his trousers, he paid back his parents every dime that a new pair cost.

Based on an immersive study of President Eisenhower’s memoirs, speeches and letters, director Peter Ellenstein and playwright Richard Hellesen have stitched together a picture of this man at an acute moment in his life, when a New York Times Magazine article that summer, "Our Presidents: A Rating  by 75 Historians," by Arthur M. Schlesinger, put Eisenhower at a demoralizing #22. The play sets out to turn that around, and it does.

It is July 1962 when we meet him, played to a precise turn by John Rubinstein, who had the title role in "Pippin" and won the Tony for "Children of a Lesser God." We are at the Gettysburg farm Ike owns with Mamie, his wife of 46 years. He is 71. 

Rubinstein conveys likable confidence in every glance, every turn of his wrist; in the lift of a coffee cup or the pouring of scotch. We see self-assurance, and an occasional trademark loss of temper. "Hell’s fire!" says the son of a Bible-reading family, pounding on his desk in a moment of anger. His pants hang just so over his fit Army physique. His soul, it seems, is tethered to a neat, closely held code of ethics, and to his own set of high expectations. 

"Eisenhower" follows other captivating shows with a master cast of one--"Tru," Robert Morse’s transformation into an aging Truman Capote (1989) and "Ann," starring Holland Taylor as spicy Texas Governor Ann Richards (2013). Skilled solo performances lift characters from flat pages. The dead come to life. They walk and talk. And we hear their voices long after the final bow, as we ride on the subway and walk through the cereal aisle.

Throughout the play, photographs of the president’s birth family, Mamie, tense moments in history and more are projected against a fertile Pennsylvania farm backdrop. 

Speaking into a tape recorder with his musings for a memoir, Ike talks squarely, yet with ripples of regret and pain over horrors he witnessed.

A German concentration camp. "Most of our group couldn't get through it. Hell, George Patton got sick. But I forced myself to see every last inch of that camp. Then I marched the local population through it, so they could never say ‘they didn't know.’"

The integration battle at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor called off the National Guard, leaving the students to face angry mobs. "So the next troops to arrive in Little Rock were that Hundred and First Airborne that led the way on D-Day. I think that was the hardest decision I had to make as president: putting troops into an American city, where they do not belong. But it was a matter of justice, pure and simple. The law was enforced--those children got the education they had a right to."

The McCarthy hearings. McCarthy was "a fascist in a rumpled suit," a skunk, with Roy Cohn at his side. "The skunk and the weasel," Ike called them. 

Book burning. McCarthy planned to have books written by "Communists or leftists" in State Department libraries overseas be taken off the shelf and burned. "Don’t join the book burners! If we start believing that every individual or party that disagrees with us is somehow wicked or treasonous, then we are near the end of freedom's road."

Grave personal loss. Icky, who was Ike and Mamie’s first child, died in his dad's arms from scarlet fever at age 3. Ike blamed himself, because he had hired a maid, Mary, a girl who said she had scarlet fever but had recovered. "That first loss…it’s haunted me for 40 years," he says. "I said I always wanted to find a reason for things that happened--but what could possibly be the reason…Except to let it guide you for the rest of your life." 

The ground reference is real. "This piece of ground, that we all share...if we're going to leave our young people something better, then we just can't be complacent. We must never be content with half truth when the whole truth can be ours. We have to keep choosing the harder right instead of the easier wrong." Words to ponder, with criminal and FBI investigations facing a former president who plans to run for reelection.

Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground

At the Theatre at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; eisenhowertheplay.com. Original seven-week engagement extended through August 20.  Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes.