It had all the elements of a great thriller. A con man abuses the trust of his friends and colleagues at a big newspaper, lies about everything from his upbringing to his résumé to his sources, boozes and gets high, then shakes the entire institution to its core.
Season that potboiler with racial elements, and you have the Jayson Blair scandal, a real-life drama that rocked the New York Times in 2003 and seemed to draw from “The Music Man,” “The Front Page” and “Six Degrees of Separation.”
Unfortunately, Gabe McKinley’s new off-Broadway play about the controversy, “CQ/CX” — copy-editing terms — is a cheesy, ham-fisted affair. If you’re in the mood for inspirational, grandstanding tirades about the Gray Lady, check right in. Otherwise, just rent the newsroom-centered fifth season of “The Wire.”
McKinley, a former Times journo who left in 2008 after 12 years, changed all the names, but sticks fairly closely to the facts. If you followed the case, you may get a slightly bigger kick out of this play à clef, but it’s not enough to make up for the limp pacing and ponderous lines.
Stylishly directed by David Leveaux for the Atlantic Theater Company, the play essentially pits one trio against another.
In one corner, we have the paper’s future: eager-beaver cub reporters Monica Soria (Sheila Tapia), Jacob Sherman (the excellent Steve Rosen) and Jay Bennett, the Blair stand-in (Kobi Libii).
In the other, there’s the paper’s confident, cigar-smoking establishment: executive editor Hal Martin (Arliss Howard), managing editor Gerald Haynes (Peter Jay Fernandez) and publisher Junior (David Pittu). Stuck in the middle is Larry Bryggman’s veteran newsman, who spits out pearls of wisdom like “This place will eat you up if you let it.”
Pittu (“LoveMusik,” “Is He Dead?”) is so sneakily good as the avatar for Arthur Sulzberger Jr., a soft-bellied scion running the family business, that you wish the show were all about Junior. But no: It’s about the repellent Jay, whom we follow through haphazardly connected scenes as he starts making up stories.
The play ends with his unmasking. Sadly, it doesn’t mention the juicy detail that Blair is now a life coach in Virginia — a minor offense compared to the fact that “CQ/CX” also underexploits Blair’s cloak-and-dagger lies.
Far worse is that Libii, nasally and squinty, doesn’t have an ounce of charisma. You can’t imagine his smug, smarmy Jay charming his friends, let alone hard-nosed editors.
This creates an insurmountable problem for the show: The whole point of the Blair case is that nearly everyone was eager to forgo the facts in favor of the legend.