“Camping with Henry and Tom”

In his play “Camping with Henry and Tom” — which is currently on the bill at the Haywood Arts Regional Theater — author Mark St. Germain takes us on a camping trip with Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, and President Warren G. Harding. This expedition — Ford and Edison apparently enjoyed several such jaunts together — occurs in the summer of 1921, shortly after Harding’s inauguration.

As we join this trio, who have deliberately separated themselves from the federal agents and personal assistants who accompany them on the trip, we find the three men in the middle of a woods just after their automobile has hit a deer. They find that they can’t start the damaged car, and so they begin visiting, permitted by their solitude to bare their souls, talking scandals, politics, the nature of God and man, the ways of love and marriage. As the conversation deepens, we learn about the plans of Henry Ford (Preston Tinsley) to blackmail President Harding (Jack Ross) while at the same time winning the support for his own run for the presidency from Thomas Edison (Bob Baldridge). The rest of the play centers on Ford’s plans, with most of the amusement provided by exchanges between the earnest Ford and the acerbic Edison.

Although one subject of “Camping with Henry and Tom” is politics, and though much is made in promotions of the play of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism — which was real and beyond question — the play never falls into any sort of modern liberal versus conservative political debate more concerned with didactics than with truth. Like movie stars who appear on television to pontificate about American injustice, the rights of Palestinians or the educational system, Ford and Edison slowly reveal themselves as men who, though they are geniuses in their own fields of invention and manufacture, are ignorant novices in subjects outside their areas of expertise. Ford, for example, is justly depicted as a materialist and a political fool; as Edison rightly points out, he isn’t a leader and has no chance of the presidency. Ford creates the conditions for his own downfall; he wants to gather his support by negative attacks on various groups of people, starting with Jewish bankers.

On the other hand, Edison’s bitter practicality and ignorance of both history and religion remind us that a man who invents a light bulb may be deficient as a schoolboy in matters of the spirit. At one point in the play, Edison essentially asks what good Jesus Christ or Christians have done in world history other than to offer better slogans to make war. It is unclear whether the playwright offers this ignorant assertion as possessing any validity, and therefore we must assume, without recourse to extensive reading, that Edison said such things. If so, he was as big a fool as his friend Ford.

By having the three men involved in an accident, and so cast upon their own devices to face the night, the playwright also shows us both the pragmatism and the materialism of these three men, traits as American as apple pie, and looting. Ford appears as a sort of American fascist; he has a vision, but its execution is based on action and strength, and on what he terms Christianity, though this is a cultural Christianity rather than spiritual. Edison comes across as a humorous but cynical man who may amuse us, but who also believes only in what he can touch, taste or see. Put beside them, Harding, often regarded as one of our softest and most corrupt presidents, suddenly takes on a sheen of bright virtue.

Tinsley, Ross, and Baldridge, who respectively play Ford, Harding, and Edison, give us fine performances. Both Tinsley and Baldridge physically resemble old photographs of Ford and Edison, and Baldridge in particular captures an irascible Edison in his declining years. Jack Ross gives us the Warren G. Harding of the history books — handsome, a ladies’ man, a weak politician who was likeable but easily corrupted. Carl Bredahl, who in his first appearance on the HART stage gives us Col. Edmund Starling, turns in a solid performance as the president’s Secret Service agent.

Bernie Hauserman directs this fine cast, assisted by stage manager Julie Kinter and by assistant stage manager Beth Holmes. The seamstress was Mary Olson, and the lighting and sound operator was Jonathan Patrick Minick. Credit should also be given to those who helped recreate the camping scene on stage, with its trees, thickets and logs, and old Model-T.

“Camping with Henry and Tom” will run Sept. 8-10 at 7:30 p.m. There will be a Sunday matinee at 3 p.m. on Sept. 11. For more details and ticket prices call HART on weekday afternoons at 828.456.6322.

— Jeff Minick