On Stage as Gore Vidal

The English actor of the stage and screen Peter Eyre on his new role in Terre Haute, a play based on Vidal's letters to the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

On the face of it, Peter Eyre makes an unlikely Gore Vidal. He is an English actor of the old school, as happy behind a proscenium as in front of a camera. He has shared the stage and screen with some of the finest: Ralph Richardson in Dragonslayer, Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, Patrick Stewart in Hedda, and John Gielgud and Jason Robards in Julius Caesar.

When he stumbled across a script for Terre Haute, Edmund White’s play about the correspondence between Vidal and the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, he called White and suggested he play the part of America’s most persistent gadfly and well-connected contrarian. “I had met Edmund ever so slightly,” said Eyre between rehearsals for the New York opening of Terre Haute in preview on Tuesday at the 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “I told him, ‘I want to do your play,’ and he went very, very quiet. He wasn’t very enthusiastic.”

“I think people like plays like this in the way that people like reading biographies rather than novels. They have a distrust of the imagination.”

The hesitation was momentary, and before long Eyre was hawking the play from place to place, from a workshop at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program to a preliminary performance at the Edinburgh Festival, taking in a work in progress session at London’s Old Vic, followed by a full-blown and well-received production at the Trafalgar Studios in London. The play has undergone many changes since White first wrote it.

The idea of turning the brief correspondence between Vidal, the elegant, snippy liberal man of letters, and McVeigh, an anti-government militiaman and America’s most notorious politically motivated mass murderer, proved difficult. To begin with, the letters have not been published and many were destroyed, so the play is inevitably mostly a work of fiction.

While Vidal has written about the exchange in Vanity Fair, and quoted from the letters, he is prickly about the comparison between his reaching out to a murderer on death row and the obvious literary parallel: the part ghoulish, part flirtatious liaison between Truman Capote and the petty thief turned murderer Perry Smith that informed Capote’s best seller In Cold Blood.

Vidal has gone out of his way to distance himself from Capote, whose exploitation of Smith on death row became hugely controversial. “To show what an eager commercialite I am—hardly school of Capote—I kept no copies of my letters to [McVeigh] until the last one in May,” wrote Vidal, heading off criticism he was copying Capote’s modus operandi. While Capote’s pursuit of the caged primitive Smith was cynical and homoerotic, Vidal insists the motivation for his exploration of McVeigh’s explanation for the Oklahoma bombing was high-minded.

Vidal believes McVeigh’s version of events—that the slaughter at the hands of federal forces of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 was an act of war that demanded an act of retaliation. The author of The Best Man and the historical novels Lincoln and Burr went to great lengths to explain that the Oklahoma massacre, in 1995, was not an act of insanity but a political act, a crude blow against creeping government authoritarianism. (McVeigh was executed in June 2001.)

Vidal’s connections to both the Gore and the Kennedy Democratic dynasties have left him with a fascination for political theory and the practice of politics at the highest levels. His interest in McVeigh was inspired by his belief that the American republic has strayed far from its noble beginnings.