THREE TALL WOMEN – REVIEW OF 2021 STRATFORD FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas 

Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women is an intriguing, stimulating and brilliant play that receives a production befitting the latter description by the Stratford Festival, in the small Studio Theatre. The pandemic reduced the number of spectators but it did nothing to affect the extraordinary quality of the production.

Diana Leblanc directed the outstanding Martha Henry, Lucy Peacock and Mamie Zwettler in a production that brought out the humour, tragedy and impact of Albee’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize winner that is partly autobiographical and riveting theatre. The play was done in two parts. Act I was performed at 3:00 in the afternoon and an Act II at 7:00 in the evening.     

The three tall women of the first act are named A, B and C for reasons that are hinted on in the first act and become more explicit in the second half. A (Martha Henry) is a 90+ year old wealthy woman who is taken care of by B (Lucy Peacock) and is visited by C (Mamie Zwettler), a young woman from a lawyer’s office.

From left: Mamie Zwettler, Lucy Peacock and Martha Henry. Photography by V. Tony Hauser.

A is the centre of attention. The following are some of the traits of the wealthy, old woman: selfish, arrogant, bigoted, threatening, crotchety, vengeful, paranoid, confused, forgetful, unpleasant. A rich bitch. She needs a walker to get around and B and C don’t kowtow to her all the time.

B at 52 is a caregiver who can be sarcastic or put up with the old bitch without hiding her displeasure at times. C at 26 is pretty, ambitious and tries to get some paperwork signed by A without much luck. Like B she does not always hide her displeasure.

In the second act, A is up and about and the three women discuss life in the wealthy class including courtship, love, marriage, hope, optimism, dreams, infidelity, horseback riding, children and all the miseries that life can bring.

Albee gives us hints in the first act about who these women are. C is 26, B is twice that at 52. They do not have names except for the letters of the alphabet. In the second act, it becomes clearer especially in C’s recollection of the first time she made love and A and B have the same memory. We realize that the three tall women are in fact one woman at three stages in her life.

The production is superb. Martha Henry gives a supreme performance as A using her immense talent to display all the characteristics of the old woman described above; Lucy Peacock, using the twang in her voice that she can employ when she wants to, is simply outstanding as the woman in middle age who is beyond youthful optimism and will soon face what she sees in the future. Mamie Zwettler as C is a good girl, she tells us, and she will never become like the two other women. She will find a way to avoid all the miseries that she sees and hears described by herself at different stages of her life. Beautifully done.

The play has a fourth character called The Boy, a silent part played by Andrew Iles. He is usually seen as Albee himself confronting his mother and his hideous relationship with her.

The production is designed by Francesca Callow. The set is a room in the house of a wealthy person with several chairs and some furniture. That is all that is required. In the second act, Albee’s stage directions call for A to remain lying on a bed with a mask on. We only see a mask because A will appear live. In this production, we see A on a platform above the acting area, lying in bed.  It works.

To go back to the beginning, the play Three Tall Woman and this production under the expert direction of Diana Leblanc, is theatre at its best. Something we should see on a regular basis.

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Three Tall Women by Edward Albee continues until October 9, 2021 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George Street East, Stratford. Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press

SALT-WATER MOON – REVIEW OF GUILD FESTIVAL THEATRE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

The Guild Theatre Festival is in its 10^th season with a production of David French’s Salt-Water Moon in the Greek Theatre in the Guild Park and Gardens in Scarborough. The two-hander is an excellent choice and the Guild Festival provides an entertaining evening in the beautiful setting of the park.

Salt-Water Moon is a marvelous play about Jacob, a young man of seventeen returning to Newfoundland to woo his girlfriend Mary, a year after he left her to go to Toronto. The play is richly poetic and full of humour, tenderness and drama. Mary is understandably angry, hurt and resentful for being abandoned by Jacob. In his absence she became engaged to a rich young man if only to get out of her poverty.

The play is set in Coley’s Point, Newfoundland in August 1926, ten years after the Battle of the Somme in which hundreds of Newfoundlanders were slaughtered. Mary’s father was killed while Jacob’s father survived but both families ended up in dire poverty and victims of abuse by the well-off people of the town.

Sarah Gibbons and Alex Furber

Jacob and Mary have to work out the personal pain and anger as well as the social conditions that they are living in before they can let love triumph over all those obstacles.

The Guild Theatre stages the play in the Greek Theatre which consists of eight Greek columns in a park with a few dozen plastic chairs in the grass for the audience. On a warm summer evening it is a beautiful setting and requires no sets at all except for a rocking chair.

Alex Furber as Jacob and Sarah Gibbons as Mary have a lot of ground to cover in 90 minutes as they go through many stages of courtship, conflicting emotions, visits to the past, and looks at the present. Furber and Gibbons do fine work and they take us through  the emotional variations and narration of past events.

Furber as Jacob must display a lot of ardor, show bravado, belittle Mary’s fiancé, be entertaining and cajoling, and go through a gamut of methods to appease and convince Mary that he still loves her. Gibbons as Mary has not only to work out her anger and hurt but to consider her social position and her sister’s condition before choosing to dump her wealthy fiancé.

Both Furber and Gibbons have to bring out French’s poetry and they do a good job in delivering  the musicality of the Newfoundland accent and the resonance of the prose.

Director Helen Juvonen does a fine job in keeping the pace of the play and being attentive to the pauses and the necessary modulations.

Salt-Water Moon premiered at the Tarragon Theatre in 1984 in the halcyon days of Bill Glassco and Canadian theatre. Coley’s Point, Newfoundland, where it is set also happens to be David French’s birthplace. It was a pleasure to see it again.

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Salt-Water Moon by David French will run until August 15, 2021, at The Greek Theatre, Guild Park & Gardens, 201 Guildwood Parkway, Scarborough, Ontario. www.guildfestivaltheatre.ca/

James Karas is the Senior Editor of The Greek Press, Toronto

BLINDNESS – REVIEW OF UNBELIEVABLE THEATRE AT PRINCESS OF WALES

 Reviewed by James Karas

Blindness is a work for the theatre based on a novel. No amount of describing it can give an adequate depiction of actually experiencing the production. I will shortcut my review by advising you to get your ticket as fast as possible. Go to www.mirvish.com/ and start booking. It is theatre like you never saw before and never imagined. I will give you some details without any pretence to doing the production justice.

Let me take you through some of the steps you will take to get in the theatre that may give an idea of what Blindness is about. If you manage to get one of the 50 tickets that are available for each performance, you will be assigned a spot in the lobby of The Princess of Wales Theatre corresponding to your seat number. You will be given instructions about social distancing, Covid-19 protocols and more importantly what you can do during the show if you need to get out or, by implication, get a panic attack.

You will then be led on the stage of The Princess of Wales Theatre and shown to your seat which is pandemic-protocol situated in rows where not everyone is facing in the same direction. The walls are all black but there are lights above and under the seats. There is a set of headphones, a flashlight beside you for emergency purposes and instructions about conduct. These are just the preliminaries and the performance which lasts about 75 minutes has not begun yet.

The production begins and you hear the marvellous voice of Juliet Stevenson through your earphones telling a dramatic story about a man suddenly and inexplicably going blind in his car on a busy street in an unnamed city. He is driven to his home by a kind stranger who then steals his car. He is taken to the office of his ophthalmologist and information starts trickling in that many other people are going blind as well. The ophthalmologist goes home and he too becomes blind. His wife does not.

There is a major and catastrophic epidemic of blindness and people are starving, killing each other and dogs are seen eating the flesh of a recently deceased person. It is a horrific situation that inspires terror, hunger, inhumanity and the need for communal cohesion. Epidemics have been around since time immemorial and there are heart-wrenching descriptions of their effects on people. I think of reading descriptions of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century or Daniel Defoe’s A Year of the Plague Journal that are unbearable. What you get in Blindness is more immediate and far more terrifying.

Blindness has an additional and crucial difference. All the people are are moved by the government to a hospital for their protection and safety. They are in fact moved to a large warehouse, a former mental asylum where they are prisoners. The play is as much about totalitarian government as it is about an epidemic.

There are no actors in Blindness except for the voice of Juliet Stevenson speaking in your headphone. When she speaks or whispers to her husband and to other victims it is as if she is speaking or whispering to you. Not the other 49 people on the stage, just you. She whispers that she is looking for a lighter and you hear her in your left ear. She then flicks the lighter near your right ear. You hear her footsteps as she come near you from behind and hear and almost feel her breath as she speaks. You instinctively turn around – it is completely dark in the theatre – to see her. Do you remember the scene of the Cowardly Lion facing the Wizard of Oz? He was startled when he thought someone pulled his tail. He was so scared he pulled it himself. I had a Cowardly Lion moment. I was holding onto the headphones cable and when I turned to see who was speaking in my ear, I pulled the cord and thought I had bumped into the speaker. There was no one there, of course, but the illusion persisted throughout that you were with the ophthalmologist’s wife and the blind people experiencing the nightmare of the epidemic.

The sound system is so brilliant, you hear the whispers and intimate talk as if someone is an inch away from you as well as the loud noises further off and everything that is happening in the hospital, the basement of the supermarket or outside on the street. It is a frightful experience.

The lights flash on and off. The fluorescent fixtures are lowered to eyelevel. But much of the time we are like the people we hear about, in complete darkness.

Blindness is subtitled “A Socially Distanced Sound Installation” and is based on the novel by José Saramago, which was published in 1995, well before the current pandemic. The novel provides the basic story but it is the genius Simon Stephens who adapted the novel for the stage, Walter Meierjohann who directed the production for the Donmar theatre in London, Ben and Rex Ringham who designed the sound system, Lizzie Clachan who designed the production and Jessica Hung Han Yun who designed the lighting. I feel I am doing them a gross injustice by simply listing their names but the result is a theatrical masterpiece.    

I go back to the beginning. Get your tickets and see theatre like you have never seen before.

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Blindness by Simon Stephens based on the novel by José Saramago continues until August 29, 2021 at the Princess of Wales Theatre, 300 King St. West, Toronto, Ontario. www.mirvish.com/

OFF THE GRID - REVIEW OF PRODUCTION IN VICTORIA-BY-THE-SEA

Reviewed by James Karas

Off the Grid is a play by John Spurway that is playing at the Victoria Playhouse in Victoria-by-the-Sea, a village on the south shore of Prince Edwards Island. On occasion, the theatre or the city merit some comments somewhere in the review.  The Victoria Playhouse and Victoria-by-the-Sea deserve much more.

It is a fishing village that was founded in 1819. It had its days of glory which were diminished when the Trans Canada Highway bypassed it. The village is not doing badly by any stretch of the imagination. Its population in 2011 was 102 but by 2016 it had shrunk by 28% to 74. According to a resident, it has sprung back to over 100.

The village has many amenities that much bigger towns would envy including the Victoria Playhouse, which was established forty years ago, that, according to its president, has provided “riveting drama, uproarious comedy, an excellent concert series, children’s theatre lessons, a community cornerstone, countless memories and so much more.” In a village of 100 people!

                                                        Photo: Heather Ogg

The Victoria Playhouse is a beautiful small theatre that can seat 150 people but had only 48 spectators when I attended because of Covid-19 distancing rules.

Playwright John Spurway, a native of New Brunswick, has had several of his plays produced but none in Atlantic Canada until the Victoria Playhouse picked up his Off the Grid. It is a good choice for a summer festival. It needs three actors and a simple, single set. For the plot, we have Marty (Melissa Kramer) and her husband Leonard (Dennis Trainor) who go to a remote cabin in the woods that has no internet, no television or any of the amenities that we associate with life in the city. But the cabin does have some special features.

Marty is an architect and Leonard a bank loans officer and they do have some issues between them. They want a child however Leonard is reluctant to take the requisite steps, but Marty is pursuing it methodically. She is also writing an article about the isolated but ultra-modern cabin which has a special indoor outhouse.

One of the couple’s issues, we are told by Leonard, is that she speaks 20,000 words per day to his 7,000. What’s more, he has a secret that he is afraid to reveal to his wife and is unsure about his future. They have a neighbour, Lowell (Lee J. Campbell) who looks like a hermit and lives in a ramshackle cabin nearby. (Marty and Leonard’s cabin is not that isolated after all) Lowell has a deep secret as well and all of their issues will be unraveled in an entertaining way.

There is good verbal humour. Lowell describes a situation when an electric tool loses its power. It stops vibrating and the woman decides to finish the job herself and the man says when that happens one has to take things in hand. Well, you did not guess it until he tells us that he is talking about an electric toothbrush. The series of double entendre are hilarious.

Kramer and Trainor play the attractive couple with their strong sexual urges that, unfortunately, are not synchronized and other misunderstandings. Campbell’s Lowell looks like an old hermit but turns out to be a far more interesting man. Mark Fraser directs the play and sets a brisk pace as the complications ebb and flow. It is a thriller and I will not spoil the ending for you.

The play is perfect summer stock, simple, funny, at times, perhaps contrived but a pleasant way to spend an evening in a special venue like Victoria-by-the-Sea.

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Off the Grid by John Spurway continues until September 5, 2021, at the Victoria Playhouse, Victoria-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. Visit the company’s website: www.Victoriaplayhouse.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press
This review appeared first in The Greek Press.

OUTSIDE MULLINGAR - REVIEW OF THEATRE BADDECK PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Outside Mullingar is a funny, moving and intriguing play by John Patrick Shanley that receives a wonderful production by Theatre Baddeck in the village of Baddeck on Cape Breton Island. The author and the play may be familiar to many people but I suspect that the village and the theatre company do not claim the same renown. Perhaps I should admit my total ignorance of them and not presume to speak for others.

The play has four characters, the elderly Tony Reilly (Vince Carlin) and his son Anthony (Michael Peng), and Aoife Muldoon (Kathleen Sheehy) and her daughter Rosemary (Christy MacRae-Ziss). They live on adjoining cattle and sheep farms in Ireland and we meet them in December 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics where Ireland won three medals in boxing competitions, i.e., the Irish are tough fighters. It is just after the funeral of Chris Muldoon, Aoife’s husband.

The play has  a simple but beguiling plot with many tangents involving the conflict between the father and the son, the love of the land, concern about continuity after death, and most of all the relationship or lack thereof between Anthony and Rosemary.

Christy MacRae-Ziss and Michael Peng in Outside Mullingar. 

Photo by Hannah Ziss.  Copyright © 2021 Theatre Baddeck, All rights reserved.

Tony has a rocky relationship with his son who, he thinks, does not love the land or farming and is not worthy of inheriting the farm. He is thinking of giving the farm to his nephew who lives in America. Anthony at 42 has problems with his father and is incapable of having a relationship with a woman. Is he gay? Is he a virgin? What is his problem? I will not reveal it because trying to figure Anthony out is one of the play’s fascinations.

Rosemary is 35 years of age, attractive, perhaps vengeful, mysterious and probably  interested in Anthony. Their relationship dominates the play with its humour, humanity and indeed beauty. She is the strongest and most complex character in the play.

There is a scene in the play where Rosemary and Anthony confront each other. Director Douglas Beattie has them stand a few feet from each other as if their feet are nailed to the floor. The physical distance and immobility between them are emblematic of the emotional and psychological chasm that separates them. They do not move because they are locked in their own prisons and cannot reach out to each other. In the final scene, Rosemary manages to break free from her shackles and goes on the attack. She uses sound arguments and, in the end, her sexual attraction to get Anthony to notice her and break out of his own shell. A superb performance by MacRae-Ziss.

Kudos to the cast for their acting especially for delivering their lines with the musicality of the Irish accents. Carlin’s Tony is a crotchety old man who cannot get along with his son and has feelings of guilt about his wife. He sold the right of way to his farm to Muldoon who in turn gave it to Rosemary. It plays an important emotional and legal issue in the play. In the end Tony’s humanity coms forth and he reconciles with his son. A fine performance by Carlin.

Sheehy is very effective as the old Aoife who shows affection, strength and  worry as she approaches the end of her life. She delivers an Aoife as a tough old woman whose husband has just died and who knows that she will soon join him.

Peng as Anthony manages to look confused, painfully shy and a man with an embarrassing secret that dominates his life and lack of relationships with women. Can Rosemary take care of that?

Director Beattie does masterly work with the professional cast, paying attention to details and bringing forth a fine production.

Theatre Baddeck has been around since 2015 but it has been locked down for two years. It thrives in a village of 800 people and stages its shows in a large room in the Baddeck Masonic Temple. There are fewer than 100 seats in the theatre and about 30 people are allowed in due to the pandemic. Two more productions are scheduled for this year. How’s that for a village of 800 people?

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Outside Mullingar by John Patrick Shanley continues until August 7, 2021, at Theatre Baddeck, 24 Queen Street, Baddeck Nova Scotia. www.theatrebaddeck.com

 

DEAR RITA - REVIEW OF CHARLOTTETOWN FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

The Charlottetown Festival is back, albeit in a pandemic-modified format. It features three productions with emphasis on eastern Canada. The first production was Between Breaths a play by Robert Chafe about the controversial life of Dr. Jon Lien, a Newfoundlander credited with rescuing more than 500 whales trapped in fishing nets. It ran util June 19, 2021.

The second production, reviewed here, is Dear Rita, a tribute to the great Canadian singer. The next production will be Old Stock by Hannah Moscovitch, Christian Barry and Ben Caplan about Jewish refugees from Russia. It will run from August 12 to September 4, 2021.

The beautiful theatre in the Confederation Centre of the Arts can seat 1100 people but only 300 were allowed in observance of strict social distancing and other Covid related rules. The small number did not dampen the enthusiasm of the audience.

Dear Rita is appropriately subtitled as “A Musical Toast to Rita MacNeil” who the program describes as “one of the East Coast’s fiercest and most iconic songwriters.” MacNeil (1944-2013) wrote several hundred songs and produced 25 albums in a career that garnered a cartload of awards and honours, and made her hugely popular. She also led a varied and eventful life that the show alludes to without hesitation.

Lyndsay Kyte as playwright and Mike Ross as co-creator, music director and arranger have crafted a program that pays tribute to MacNeil’s wide-ranging musical contribution a well as her life. A company of eight actors, singers and musicians are tasked with presenting the program with sufficient enthusiasm and pathos as to be rewarded with a standing ovation by the reduced audience.

The four women of the cast, Michelle Bouey, Kristi Hansen, Melissa Mackenzie, and Lindsay Kyte, and four men, Sheldon Elter, and Brendan Wall with Chris Corrigan on guitar and Trevor Grant on drums, showed acting versatility, musical talent and reasonable vocal ability. The songs are sung by cast members individually and as an ensemble.

“Working Man,” a tribute to Nova Scotia coal miners “Flying on Your Own” about the strength she showed after leaving her husband, her love letter to Cape Breton “I'll see you again” and many more give a fine accounting of her varied talents in folk and country music and as references to her life.

Born in 1944 on Cape Breton Island with a cleft lip and palate, she had to suffer the worst insult that can be targeted in a small community: being “different.” She was sexually abused for years by the calloused hands of a great-uncle. She kept the abuse secret until she revealed it in her 1998 autobiography On A Personal Note.

She eventually gravitated toward Toronto more than once where she kept some menial jobs, became pregnant and had an out of wedlock daughter. She returned to Cape Breton but the desire to sing proved powerful and she left her child with her parents. Back in Toronto she got married, had a second child and even tried farming. But she could not stay away from singing and writing songs for long.

The play mentions her attempted suicide when she took a bottle of sleeping pills and her little son stood by her all night. She woke up 24 hours later and found pizza crumbs near her. Worse was to come in her battle with obesity. She reached 186 pounds and received some disgusting comments about it. The all-time low was reached during the 1993 World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Blue Jays where MacNeil sang the national anthem during one game. A Philadelphia newspaper suggested that she should get a forklift to transport her to home plate among other despicable comments.

We learn that there were numerous such insults in the media, but she seemed to take them with aplomb. When a journalist asked her if she was “a dish” when she weighed 113 pounds, she retorted that she is still a dish and asked if he was no longer a dish after he lost his hair.

Rita MacNeil had a big and resonant voice and she performed powerfully and movingly. The cast, admirably directed by Mary Francis Moore, captures much of her musical and personal life and, to their great credit, entertain us and make us want to go back to the original.

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Dear Rita by Lyndsay Kyte and Mike Ross plays from June 19 to August 6, 2021, at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, 145 Richmond Street, Charlottetown, PE C1A 1J1 https://confederationcentre.com/

James Karas is the Senior Editor – Culture of The Greek Press. This review appeared initially in the newspaper

THE GREEKS IN THE WATERGATE SCANDAL

The Greek Connection

The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and
the Untold Story of Watergate
by James H. Barron
482 pp. Melville House Publishing, 2020
ISBN 978 1 612198266

Reviewed by James Karas

James H. Barron, like all good writers, starts The Greek Connection with a startling assertion that the 1968 presidential elections were won by Richard Nixon because of the illegal funnelling of $549,000 (almost $4 million in today’s money) from Greece. The money was given to the Greek equivalent of the CIA by the American Central Intelligence Agency as aid to Greece. Then it was probably laundered and delivered to the Nixon campaign. The disclosure of this fact may have made all the difference in the election and Hubert Humphrey may have become President instead of Tricky Dicky.
 
Barron is a journalist and lawyer who wanted to investigate the Greek gift to Nixon’s campaign and was advised to contact Elias Demetracopoulos. That was in 2009 and almost ten years of research and writing has resulted in The Greek Connection: The Life of Elias Demetracopoulos and The Untold Story of Watergate.
 

It is a riveting book that has a full-blown and well-deserved biography of Demetracopoulos but it contains much more than that. It gives an astonishing glimpse intο American policy towards Greece in the latter part of the 20^th century and a portrait of corruption, lies, vilification, skulduggery and pernicious conduct on a scale that I can only describe as jaw-dropping.
 
It contains a fairly detailed history of Greece from the 1930’s onwards and especially during the regime of the military junta (1967 to 1974). Demetracopoulos spent much of his professional life in the U.S. and there are details of American politics notably about America’s relations with Greece and, of course, “the Greek connection” to the Watergate scandal.
 
Demetracopoulos is not exactly a household name in the United States and I am not sure how well he is known in Greece. Born in Athens in 1929, he achieved distinctions early in his life. He joined a small resistance group and became the youngest person to be imprisoned and brutalized by the occupying Nazis in 1943 at the age 14. He may well have been executed but through family connections he was declared mentally ill, transferred to a psychiatric hospital and survived. But a record of his “mental illness” remained.
 
After the end of the Greek Civil War, Demetracopoulos received medals and commendations for his heroism and more importantly a job as a diplomatic correspondent at Kathimerini, perhaps the best newspaper in Greece, and was assigned to cover the omnipresent Americans in Athens. His life as a journalist began in earnest. 
 
His focus on the American embassy which was practically running the country made enemies quickly. He was good at what he was doing and Ambassador John Peurifoy and CIA Chief of the Athens Station Thomas Karamessines pressed him to become a CIA informer. On his first visit to the U.S., he was pressured to do the same. He refused opening the door for retaliation.
 
Demetracopoulos displayed his amazing talent for getting interviews with highly placed politicians and ranking officers. His articles were well publicised and he seemed to know more than the embassy. The Ambassador was displeased and he began a campaign to neutralize Demetracopoulos by suggesting that his Washington interviews were “fabricated.” The embassy put out word that his war record was phoney and that he was an impostor. They disputed the presentation of awards for his war services and began the vicious campaign that was to follow Demetracopoulos throughout his life. The evidence or lack of it meant nothing; corrections and denials meant little and the lies and fabrications were simply rehashed with shameless regularity. He had the American Embassy in Greece, the State Department, the White House and the CIA pursuing him doggedly with grotesque lies. At times they did little harm; at other times they cost him jobs and did real harm.
 
But Demetracopoulos had friends as well. Senators, Congressmen, and other highly placed officials were on his side. As an example, he tried desperately to get a visa to go to Greece to see his dying father. The junta apparently stalled but made plans to abduct and assassinate him. Senator Ted Kennedy got wind of the plot and advised Demetracopoulos not to go.
 
The focal point of the book is Demetracopoulos’s career in the U.S., where he arrived in 1967, following his escape from the Greek dictators.  He became a relentless enemy of the Greek dictatorship and the most unyielding and effective advocate for the return of democracy in Greece. He had dedicated enemies who tried to destroy him and committed friends who helped him.
 
He lobbied for the cessation of American arms to Greece and met with limited success. He thought he could rely on Vice President Spiro Agnew for support. In November 1967 he met with the then governor of Maryland to enlist his support against the junta in general and the sale of arms to Greece in particular.  Agnew told him that he could not publicly oppose the junta for “political reasons” but that he would remain neutral. He did not and became an ardent supporter of the dictators.
 
The treatment that Demetracopoulos got from Americans of Greek descent is simply astounding. Not only did the Greek American leaders support the junta, but they also did all they could to malign him. Sam Nakis, the Supreme President of the American-Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) called Demetracopoulos a “self-proclaimed expatriate . . . whose profession of idealistic motivation is extremely suspect.” Nakis left AHEPA AND became vice chairman of Democrats for Nixon. John Rousakis, the Democratic mayor of Savannah called him “an obscure Greek communist journalist”. Greek newspapers across the country supported the colonels and maligned Demetracopoulos. 
 
Enter Tom Pappas, an astute businessman and loyal conservative Republican, viewed as a generous philanthropist and supporter of Greek Americans. According to Barron, Pappas was judged by others as “a manipulative, ruthless, and cunning operator, a braggart, robber baron, an amoral or immoral power-hungry narcissist.” He brought Coca-Cola to Greece as well as Esso which became Esso-Pappas. “I had to bribe four governments in five years to get the [Esso-Pappas] deal going” he bragged. He was a supporter and friend of Nixon and of the Greek colonels.
 
The scenario that Barron paints is that the Nixon campaign needed money in cash in $1000 denominations. The source would be the American CIA giving the money to the Greek CIA which would then give it to Pappas’s charitable foundation which would funnel the cash to the Nixon campaign. The facilitator was Tom Pappas. The sum of $549,000 in large denominations was too much even for the Central Bank of Greece and it had to be divided in three tranches for delivery. It was and the cash was delivered by Pappas to the Nixon campaign. The evidence of American money being laundered and recycled through the CIA into the Nixon campaign is convincing if circumstantial.
 
Demetracopoulos made the crucial decision not to pass the story to other journalists or Senators and Congressmen. He decided to give the story to President Lyndon Johnson in the expectation that he would make further and urgent enquiries and make sure that story came out. Johnson declined to do anything. Demetracopoulos had made a fatal miscalculation in not publishing the story himself and passing it on to other outlets.
 
Barron asserts that disclosure of the transfer of funds from Greece to the Nixon campaign via Tom Pappas may have been a decisive factor in the election and in the very tight race of 1968 there was a probability that Hubert Humphrey would have been elected. He was not. Demetracopoulos continued his lobbying as did relentless and even more exaggerated efforts to smear his reputation and find evidence that he was a Communist, someone in the pay of other countries and whatever the imagination could devise and despicable conduct by individuals and government agencies perpetrate.
 
On Sunday June 17, 1972, the infamous Watergate break-in in the Democratic National Committee occurred and eventually set in motion proceedings that resulted in numerous convictions and the forced resignation of Nixon. The Republicans using threats and other nefarious practices were able to prevent the break-in from becoming an issue in the November elections and Nixon was re-elected. Demetracopoulos cooperated with George McGovern’s campaign and got a promise of help for Greece but it was to no avail.
 
The investigation into the break-in continued after the election and Nixon made great efforts to protect his good friend Tom Pappas from any criminal liability. But Nixon’s cronies needed a million dollars in cash for the burglars and raising it was very difficult. The circumstantial evidence is that they could rely on Tom Pappas.
 
Tom Pappas escaped from any prosecution. All attempts to destroy Demetracopoulos failed, but they were partly successful. He was eventually vindicated and remains the greatest adversary of the junta outside of Greece and the greatest advocate for the restoration of democracy during the dictatorship.
 
Barron’s book shows meticulous research on every page and reads like a thriller even for events that one is familiar with. Demetracopoulos died in 2016 and Barron’s biography is a fitting monument to him.