Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground
Launches Summer Season at Barrington Stage
By: Charles Giuliano - Jun 04, 2025
Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground
By Richard Hellensen
Directed by Peter Ellenstein
Starring John Rubenstein
Boyd-Quinson Theater
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, Mass.
June 3 through 8
Tuesday/Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., matinees Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m.
It’s a year and a half since the end of the second term of Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He is one of several former generals who served as presidents with generally mediocre results. In 1962 the 34th President is tape recording what will be his second memoir. The first covered his career as a five star general in Europe during WWII. The second book, which is much less compelling, covers his presidency.
A panel of historians, in the New York Time Magazine, have positioned him at 22. That’s one behind Andrew Johnson and staring up at Chester A. Arthur. A projection at the end of the compelling one man play by Richard Hellensen, starring Tony winner, John Rubenstein, has him rising in periodic polls to #5 in 2023.
The veteran actor commands the full range of the stage with peripatetic motion and frenetic emotion. He has a broad vocabulary of punctuating gestures and actions. That allows for a lively articulation that bogs down and drags at times burdened with such massive swaths of history as well as glimpses of his private life.
If you known anything of the man, as I do from coming of age in the era of “I Like Ike,” any hint of controversy has been scrubbed from this sanitized paean to a great man who was flawed, bland, and somewhat ordinary. While he had charm nobody ever accused Eisenhower of charisma.
That middle American social husbandry struck us when visiting the family home and Presidential Library in Abeline, Kansas. Born into a devoutly religious family, with too many sons crammed into a small house, he escaped with a free education at West Point. Viewing his humble beginnings in the Bible Belt it’s astonishing to realize that a farm boy led the fight to free the world from fascism.
During the war he was a diplomat and mediator who kept in check a stable of colorful and combative generals. There are cameos of the egomaniacal General Douglas MacArthur who craved the Oval Office. Keeping them in line and doling out resources meant fatal errors. He did not give fuel to General Patton’s tanks. That meant that the Red Army got to Berlin first with consequences that resulted in the Cold War.
He became intimate with his British driver Kay Summersby. The play ignores that entirely with platitudes of his everlasting love for Mamie. There were affectionate images of the loyal army wife but none of Kay.
His Vice President Richard Nixon merits just a glimpse. While pledging an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the American people, for the most part, he was apolitical. He promoted infrastructure but that doesn’t play that well on the highlight reel. He gave the conservative Republicans eight years of reactionary government under his rule of populism. Only marginally did he stand up to the Red Scare of Joseph McCarthy. In the cowed senate only Margaret Madeline Chase Smith, of Maine, stood up to him. This and other pithy references resonated with the audience and the current crisis. In ever sense Eisenhower was a patriot and decent individual.
He did the right thing by ordering troops to assure law and order during desegregation in Little Rock Arkansas. President Truman started to desegregate the military and Eisenhower finished the job.
There is no evidence that he used the office for private gain. From the window of his Gettysburg farm we see that he has put in a putting green. It offers a compelling metaphor for the unchecked greed of the current regime.
This evocative one week run launches the 2025 season of theatre in the Berkshires.