E-Mail This Article to a Friend Dennehy does Dalton After the actor’s two Tonys comes Trumbo BY SALLY CRAGIN

If you didn’t know that two-time Tony winner Brian Dennehy is an actor, you might think a retired pugilist had been invited to the Calderwood Pavilion to hold a press conference. In person, the trimmed-down Dennehy is thinner than you’d expect but projects equal measures of gravitas and lightness. If he were standing next to you in a bar in South Boston, he’d fit right in. He has a modest cap of silver hair, and on this occasion, he’s wearing a black jersey with a tweed overcoat that keeps sliding off his broad shoulders. But when he grips the side of the podium, Dennehy’s affect is strictly professorial. He speaks knowledgeably and wittily about his latest theater project, Trumbo, which is based on the correspondence of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was jailed for standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee early in its infamous run. The play, an Off Broadway hit whose rotating roster of stars included Dennehy, F. Murray Abraham, Nathan Lane, Richard Dreyfuss, Tim Robbins, and Alec Baldwin, comes to Boston this month, with Dennehy channeling Trumbo throughout the run.

"This theater piece — ’cause it’s really not a play," the actor begins, "has so much passion, and good American sense, and wonderful philosophy and wonderful family anecdotes." Written by Trumbo’s son Christopher, said theater piece is drawn from Trumbo’s "collected letters from 1940 to 1960, which make up more than 600 pages," Dennehy goes on. "Small print, too."

As he leans forward, his tone grows more emphatic. He has already shouldered the role at New York’s Westside Theatre, but he’s still plenty engaged by the brilliant screenwriter and his complicated story. "He was an extraordinary man, and this is a really interesting, moving, emotional, very funny theater piece."

Trumbo had won acclaim in the 1940s as the screenwriter of Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, among other films. But as a former member of the Communist Party, he was (along with Ring Lardner Jr.) one of the notorious "unfriendly witnesses" who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. That group’s decision to stand on their First Amendment rights got them charged with contempt of Congress. Trumbo spent a year in jail in 1950 and then a decade trying to get work.

The irony is that the blacklisting of the original "Hollywood 10" proved a boon for the studios, as they were then able to get top-list writers writing under assumed names at bargain-basement prices, Dennehy notes. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when Otto Preminger put Trumbo’s real name on the film of Exodus and Kirk Douglas hired him to write Spartacus, that the writer’s credit again graced the big screen. "Douglas had to be wrestled to the ground to give it to him," Dennehy comments drolly.

Although he’s portrayed his share of bruisers on screen, Dennehy is a gifted and subtle stage performer, especially when he’s playing the leading tortured souls of American drama. His two Tony nods were for James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. He’s also passionate about plays that explore social justice, like Jessica Blank & Eric Jensen’s The Exonerated, and is a dedicated scholar of American as well as Hollywood history. When asked whether he thinks Trumbo’s treatment of blacklisting had present-day resonance, he points out that "there’s hardly any effort to suppress Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins." But then he adds that it’s a mistake to think the government was behind the blacklist. "The blacklist was the creation of the studio themselves. All the guys who won Thalberg Awards later."

Trumbo is presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in the South End, February 8 through March 6. Tickets are $46 to $50; call (617) 266-0800, or visit www.huntingtontheatre.org