Play presents actors in roles of Alaskans remembered as friends

It's the strangest feeling when you see someone you knew as a friend portrayed onstage as a historical figure.

I had that feeling this week at a rehearsal of a new play about Govs. Jay Hammond and Wally Hickel. Any Alaskan who has been around long enough will experience this double vision watching "The Ticket," which opens Friday and runs until Oct. 9 at Cyrano's Theatre in Anchorage, with talks afterward by the governors' contemporaries.

We knew these men as vivid leaders who represented something real in their beliefs about what Alaska should be. Their personalities were strong enough to survive translation through the media. The image wasn't phony. When the state was making its biggest decisions, they clearly represented two paths.

Our state is so small that many of us also knew them personally. I recall in the 1970s, when I was a teenager and my older brother's girlfriend was visiting from the East, our family ran into Hammond in the Homer boat harbor and stopped to chat for a few minutes. The girlfriend was astonished to learn, when we parted, that the courtly gentleman in the flannel shirt and rubber boots was the governor.

Hammond remained a warm acquaintance over the years. The last time I saw him we met with a few others in a downtown restaurant to discuss one of Alaska's recurring fiscal crises. He offered his ideas — always thoughtful but never simple — in the spirit of the rest of the group, an equal despite being father of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend and our most popular former governor.

I was strongly in Hammond's camp in the two governors' long war for Alaska's soul, between growth and conservation. But I got to know Hickel better, after he hired me to help write a book in the 1990s. We talked about every period of his life over many hours of interviews. I came to respect him as an American original, an extraordinary creative mind in the body of a dyslexic prize fighter.

What they had in common, besides their authenticity and forthrightness, was a profound love for Alaska. Both had the self-confidence to be comfortable as symbols as well as leaders. But Alaska came ahead of everything else, including ego, and that was why they became friends in later life.

When called upon, Hammond and Hickel joined together to stand up to big oil. That made them remarkably similar in a state that seemed to have become a wholly owned corporate subsidiary. That, and their piquant personalities, which stood out amid the blandness of today's consultant-reared politicians.

A pair of professional actors who set foot in Alaska for the first time last month will play these two quintessential Alaskans.

"I seem to be the only person in Anchorage who doesn't know who Hammond and Hickel were and have personal stories about them," said William S. Murphey, who has the intimidating job of coming from Atlanta to be Jay Hammond. "We don't talk about our governors like that. We don't run into them in the steam room."

Murphey worried that audiences will judge him for not looking or sounding enough like Hammond. Friends and family members of the governors will be there, and few outside the production have read the script by Dick Reichman.

This is not a retouched portrait of the soft-focus variety we usually get of recently dead figures. Reichman filled the play with laugh lines, many at Hickel's expense.

Yes, Hickel really said, "You can't just let nature run wild." And, "The color of nature isn't just green, it's real." And Hickel's foul language is abundantly and energetically rendered by Matt K. Miller, who nails the governor's unquenchable enthusiasm.

Reichman's goal was not to create an illusion that the governors were on stage. Indeed, the situation he imagined for them — a meeting in which Hickel tries to persuade Hammond to be his running mate in the 1990 election — is as implausible as Ulysses S. Grant courting Robert E. Lee to be vice president in 1868. It's fun to imagine, but it couldn't have happened, and nothing about the premise rings true politically.

But Reichman told me plays are not about politics, they're about people. Reading the two governors' books and talking to many of their friends, he developed a true story within a made-up setting, about two former adversaries who became friends.

The situation allowed him to reflect on his own age and self-described large ego.

"What happens to a big-ego guy when he gets past 70 and his life becomes tentative?" Reichman said. "This is a play about two old farts, my age, going through what I'm going through."

Meditation on age — my own — hit me with along with the initial discomfort of seeing the two actors pretending to be men I remembered as friends. The play is a profound reminder that history belongs to the future. Our memories of the real men will fade with us, along with the beloved Alaska of the past, to be replaced by stereotypes and caricatures constructed from the concerns of future lives.

As the play proceeds, the discomfort resolves. The real faces and voices recede from the front of your mind and the performance of the moment takes hold as the new reality.

I'm glad to say, taking that responsibility, Reichman produces a version of history that rings true at its core. The real differences between Hammond and Hickel come through — the two versions of Alaska they wanted — which boil down to nothing less than two sets of beliefs about the role of humanity on Earth.

Hickel believed nature could be improved upon. Hammond believed it was already perfect.

That debate will never end.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.