Bryan Cranston Going ALL THE WAY to HBO with Steven Spielberg

HBO Films will be bringing a bit more Broadway to our televisions with Robert Schenkkan's All the Way, the Tony, Drama Desk and Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award winning play. Bryan Cranston, who won the Tony as Best Actor for his performance as Lyndon Johnson in the Broadway production of the play, will also star for HBO.

Deadline reported last month that Steven Spielberg had optioned the play for a possible miniseries, and now they've confirmed that the project has landed at HBO, which recently scored a major hit -- and a lot of Emmy nominations -- with the televised version of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. That adaptation from stageplay to screenplay was made by the playwright, and All the Way will get the same treatment, with Schenkkan himself penning the adaptation. He has worked with Spielberg before, on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, which also aired on HBO.

All the Way was originally commissioned as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Characters like Hubert Humphrey, J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. populate the landscape of the play, an exploration of how Lyndon Johnson came to power and how this "charismatic, conflicted Texan hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil," as described by the ATCA judges when they decided the play was worthy of their top award. They called the play "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's version of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless."

Before The Pacific or All the Way, Schenkkan had already shown he knew what to do with historical material -- he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Kentucky Cycle back in 1992.

On Broadway, All the Way featured University of Illinois alum Brandon Dirden as Martin Luther King Jr., Illinois State University alum Robert Petkoff as Hubert Humphrey, and This Is Spinal Tap alum Michael McKean as J. Edgar Hoover. No word yet on who will take the supporting roles for HBO, but it seems likely it will feature an all-star cast like the one in The Normal Heart. On Broadway, Joe Mantello played Ned Weeks, but that became Mark Ruffalo for the film, good-looking-in-a-regular-way John Benjamin Hickey turned into beautiful Matt Bomer, and Ellen Barkin's role was taken over by Julia Roberts, presumably for more box office appeal. Only TV star Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) kept his role from stage to screen. That means we might expect everybody except Bryan Cranston to be replaced with actors who have bigger names or more star wattage. David Oyelowo, Nelsan Ellis and Malik Yoba have played King recently, while Leonardo DiCaprio tried on J. Edgar Hoover for size not that long ago. Humphreys are harder to find. So let's just keep the Broadway cast, shall we?

U of I's Dirden and Dickinson Go ALL THE WAY with LBJ (and Bryan Cranston)

Broadway World is reporting that University of Illinois alum Brandon Dirden will play Martin Luther King, Jr., opposite Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston as LBJ in a new production of Robert Schenkkan's All the Way opening tonight at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts

All the Way won Schenkkan the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award last April, after it was performed as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2012. Schenkkan has shown before that he likes to delve into American history; his Kentucky Cycle, which takes a dark look at the state of Kentucky from its beginnings to the late 20th century, won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1992. All the Way explores the journey of Lyndon Johnson, "a Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite," as he came to power and then "hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil." When they awarded the play their New Play Award, the American Theatre Critics Association called All the Way "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's portrait of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless."

Cranston knows a bit about "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless" after playing high school teacher/drug dealer Walter White on AMC's Breaking Bad since 2008. He earned three Emmy wins in a row in the Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series category for that role. On film, you'll find him in Argo and Little Miss Sunshine, and his television appearances include six years as the dad on Malcolm in the Middle, a recurring role as dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, and way back when, a stint as good guy Doug Donovan on the soap opera Loving.

Brandon J. Dirden has an MFA in acting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as does his wife, Crystal A. Dickinson, who will play Coretta Scott King in All the Way. Dirden won an Obie for his role as Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson at Signature Theatre and his Broadway credits include Clybourne Park, Enron and Prelude to a Kiss. Chicago audiences may remember him from Magnolia at the Goodman.

Dickinson starred in Clybourne Park both on and off-Broadway, and she did Broke-ology at Playwrights Horizon and The First Breeze of Summer at Lincoln Center.

Others of note in the cast of All the Way include Reed Birney as Humbert Humphrey and Strom Thurmond, Dan Butler as George Wallace and four other roles, Peter J. Fernandez, Dakin Matthews, Ethan Phillips, and Michael McKean as J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Byrd.

Top Steinberg/ATCA Prize Goes to Robert Schenkkan for LBJ Drama

The Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards are handed out every year during the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville. This year, the finalists were Johnna Adams for her script Gidion's Knot, a teacher/parent drama about suicide and grief; Ayad Akhtar for his political thriller The Invisible Hand; Luca Hnath for Death Tax, a life, death and taxes struggle that premiered at last year's Humana Festival; Mia McCullough for Impenetrable, about beauty and its impossible standards; Dan O'Neal for The Wind Farmer, a mythic piece about hanging on to old traditions in a changing world; and Robert Schenkkan for All the Way, a new play about President Lyndon Johnson.

A committee within the American Theatre Critics Association reads scripts suggested by its membership, choosing six finalists -- new plays first produced outside New York City -- from among the field submitted. The ATCA reports that this year, they evaluated a record 42 plays for consideration for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play citations, which awards a total of $40,000 to the winning playwrights. That sum represents "the largest national new play award focusing on regional theaters as the crucible for new plays in the United States."

Robert Schenkkan

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan was the big winner, with a $25,000 check presented along with a plaque, for his LBJ play, All the Way, which was commissioned to be performed last summer as part of the "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle" project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Schenkkan is no stranger to American history; his Kentucky Cycle won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1991. Characters like Hubert Humphrey, J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr. populated the landscape of Schenkkan's play, an exploration of how Lyndon Johnson came to power and how this "charismatic, conflicted Texan hurl[ed] himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil." The ATCA judges called the play "an engrossing, epic" play and described Schenkkan's version of LBJ as "complex, obscene, brilliant and ruthless." 

Actor Jack Willis as Lyndon Johnson in the OSF production of All the Way

The two $7500 citations went to Adams' Gideon's Knot and Hnath's Death Tax, both gripping dramas about the American way of life and death.

Adams' play premiered at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Gidion's Knot involves a grieving mother who clashes with her dead son's teacher to try to find some explanation for his suicide. Fifth-grader Gidion wrote a horrifying story for school, something powerful and violent and strange, but no more violent, no more strange than the medieval literature his mother studies. Was Gidion too aggressive to stay in school? Or pushed around by other aggressors? Either way, who's to blame?

The issues in Hnath's Death Tax are equally compelling, as we see a withered old woman, a dragon sitting on a pile of money, who tries to bargain with her nurse in an assisted care facility to keep herself alive. Nurse Tina is not on the take to murder her patient, even if she can't convince the old dragon of that. "Without positing easy answers, the play dissects greed, dysfunctional human relationships and the potential implications of a medical paradigm that can keep people alive indefinitely," noted the ATCA. 

Since its inception, the Steinberg New Play Award has singled out and honored playwrights like
Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, August Wilson and Lanford Wilson. Yussef  El Guindi took the prize last year for his play Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. For the complete list of winners and runners-up, click here.

For more information on the Steinberg/ATCA Award, contact William F. Hirschman, chair of the ATCA New Play Committee, at muckrayk@aol.com or 954-478-1123; Jay Handelman, ATCA chair, at criticjay@gmail.com,or 941-361-4931; or Christopher Rawson, ATCA communications chair, at cchr@pitt.edu or 412-216-1944.