Just like Karl Rove, only young, slim, well-dressed and handsome

Here’s something we hadn’t planned on contemplating: Karl Rove, the early years.

But that’s what comes to mind reading about a new production of a political morality play, “Farragut North,” which just opened a run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

In his review today, our colleague Charles McNulty describes the play by Beau Willimon as an “engaging drama about the dirty tricks and brutal back stabbing of those conducting the spin war for aspiring presidents.” McNulty says the play has the ring of truth, observing that the playwright once worked for Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York and former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. (We wonder if the play features a character who screams.)

Central to the play, McNulty writes, is its “attractively malign central character,” Stephen Bellamy, a 25-year-old press secretary for a Democratic presidential candidate.

Except for the Democratic part, this brings us to Rove. “Imagine Karl Rove as a fit, chicly dressed media strategist for the other side and you have some idea of the nature of this latest boy genius,” McNulty writes.  

Bellamy is played by Chris Pine, who this year boldly went where William Shatner had gone before. Pine plays a young Capt. James T. Kirk in the latest movie incarnation of "Star Trek."

In a review of a New York production of the play last fall (yes, election season), the New York Times’ Ben Brantley had this to say about the Bellamy character (played by John Gallagher Jr.):

When Stephen is smooth-talking a reporter or a potential sexual conquest, like an ambitious 19-year-old intern named Molly...he sounds absolutely authentic. It’s when he is forced to speak from the heart, in anguished apology, that he sounds robotic. Spontaneity has become a foreign language.

Sounds like required viewing for pols everywhere. Even if you can’t see the play or find a copy -- we couldn't when we looked this morning -- the reviews by McNulty and Brantley still make for thought-provoking reading. Click here for McNulty, here for Brantley and here if you want more on Pine.

-- Steve Padilla

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Top photo: Chris Pine and Chris Noth in "Farragut Noth." Photo credit: Kirk McCoy/Los Angeles Times

Bottom photo: Karl Rove. Photo credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images