THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2026 | Volume 261

 

Those of us of a certain age may not remember many details from Sidney Lumet’s 1976 movie Network that was nominated for 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture, and that won Oscars for Peter Finch (Best Actor), Faye Dunaway (Best Actress) and Paddy Chayefsky (Best Original Screenplay). But we do remember news anchor Howard Beale (Finch) screaming, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take this anymore!”

Half a century later, many of the movie’s details turn out to be eerily on the nose. A nation and world in chaos, an oil crisis, corporate takeovers of the news media by ultra-rich capitalist empires, “news” that’s nothing but lies and bullshit, an ultra-cynical public, and the newsreader (or podcaster) whosepresentations keep upping the outrage, breaking through the decorum of traditional news delivery and making him a celebrity.

Back then it was called a satire. Today, it plays like a documentary.

In 2017, before Trump 2.0, British playwright Lee Hall adapted Chayefsky’s screenplay for the stage. Kathleen Duborg’s ambitious United Players production of Network stars David Marr, sensational as Howard Beale in a sparkling cast of 13, and tells a story that feels outrageously contemporary.

In the play it’s 1975 and Beale, the long-time nightly news anchor for the UBS television network, has just been fired. Ratings are through the floor and the corporate suits have decided to ditch money-losing news altogether. Then Beale goes on air to announce his departure, says he’s going to kill himself on camera, and the ratings suddenly shoot up.

Night after night he talks of “this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in” and how he and his audience are “tired of the bullshit”—and the ratings skyrocket. His producer, Max Schumacher (Tom McBeath), begs him to stop embarrassing himself and get off the air. But the ambitious Head of Programming, Diana Christiansen (Alison Wandzura), convinces the suits that Beale, “a latter-day prophet” and a goldmine, should stay on as anchor and up the ante even more. And so he does, riling up his audience to get mad and insist they won’t take it anymore, even as he himself becomes more and more unglued.

All this is interwoven with corporate shenanigans involving a takeover of the parent company by CCA, a corporation fronting for “Arab” money;an affair between Diana and Max; and faceoffs between various high-ups, most involving Frank Hackett (Gordon Law), the Head of news. Late in the play we meet the spacey billionaire chair of CCA, Arthur Jensen, played brilliantly by Kyle Mitchell Swanson as a barefooted Zuckerberg clone, who preaches a gospel of the world as an elaborate corporate network.

Emily Dotson’s set serves as the TV studio where director Duborg carefully choreographs most of the cast in the chaos of the moments just before going on air, including the warm-up guy (Eric Epstein) working the theatre audience as if we were the studio audience. A 10” TV set and a large screen show the projections the home audience presumably sees. Kudos to tech director Phil Miguel and Projections Tech Laura Riondet, and probably several others, for making all the tech credible.

I couldn’t help thinking about media mogul and Trump buddy David Ellison, who owns CBS and Paramount and is about to buy Warner Brothers. As I’m writing this I see a New York Times story about CBS Radio News, home of the legendary Edward R. Murrow, shutting down after almost a century. Ellison-appointee Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News, laments that “challenging economic realities” made it “impossible to continue the service.”

Yeah, we’re mad as hell. But we just keep taking it. See this show.

 

 

 

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