Dallas' Play a tonic for our uncivil times (Delta Democrat Times)

Delta Democrat Times, January 26, 2001

As a group, all 100 current U.S. senators should see David Dallas' one-man show, A Gentleman from Mississippi: One Person Salutes Senator John C. Stennis.

Ideally, today's members of "the world's greatest deliberative body" should be seated on metal folding chairs a few feet from the porch of a tired-looking, dogtrot house in the hills of east-central Mississippi on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

After 90 minutes with David Dallas, the dome of the U.S. capitol would surely never be "common" in those solons' sight.

Dallas, 34, who grew up in Cleveland and now lives in Philadelphia, Pa., performed his one-man tribute to the late Sen. Stennis before several hundred people on Monday night in the main hall of the Bologna Performing Arts Center on the Delta State University campus.

The son of Jerry and Melva Dallas, David Dallas helped during his days as a graduate student at Mississippi State University to care for Stennis, and kept a journal on which he later relied when he wrote the play.

If the 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans who occupy the chamber Stennis honored for more than 40 years could glean two things from A Gentleman from Mississippi, it would be best for the nation if they were to grasp his devotion to duty and his passion for the truth.

"I want to plow a straight furrow right down to the end of my row," Stennis, the son of a farmer, pledged to voters when he sought elevation from the status of Circuit Court judge to U.S. senator.

Dallas' play makes clear Stennis stuck to that motto, but the late lawmaker's line about the truth is one his successors might make immediate use of in this era of equivocations about what the meaning of "is" is.

"I don't want the facts. I want the true facts," Dallas snapped as he recreated the memory of Stennis probing the conduct of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who became infamous for his excesses in pursuit of Communists.

During the course of the play, Dallas shifts between periods when he portrays Stennis, periods when he is himself as narrator and periods when he revisits conversations between himself and the aging Stennis. Dallas' mastery of the voice of John Stennis at different stages of the senator's life is near-perfect. Only in a handful of moments can one hear a faint deviation.

Dallas is also impressive as he models the physical characteristics, facial and otherwise, of the elderly Stennis.

Two instances stick out when one considers Dallas' command of his subject's physical suffering. One is when Dallas tells how Stennis was shot during a holdup; the other is when Dallas portrays the senator's struggle to stand and speak in the Senate chamber for the first time after having a leg
amputated.

Senate rules require members to stand when making addresses, and even in disability and frailty, Stennis forced himself to comply, so great was his respect for the institution in which he served.

Major political figures in our culture usually attract biographers - dispassionate, often ruthless, puzzle-builders. Stennis has them whipped. He was granted an actor - a man with the heart and imagination to bring him back to life.

Written by Robert Smith

© Delta Democrat Times 2001