[In the following review, Kilian discusses Fast's stage version of Citizen Tom Paine and actor Richard Thomas's lead performance as Paine.]

Tom Paine lives.

He has been brought back to life by Richard Thomas, an actor of intellect and range who gained fame playing John-Boy in “The Waltons,” and playwright Howard Fast, the iconoclastic and prolific left-wing author of Freedom Road, Spartacus, The Immigrants and more than 40 other books, who was jailed and blacklisted in the 1950s for membership in the Communist Party (from which he subsequently resigned).

Their collaborative efforts have produced Citizen Tom Paine, a two-act patriotic play adapted from Fast's novel of the same title. It is a tour de force for Thomas, who nearly exhausts himself in an energetic 2 1/2-hour re-creation of the life of the brilliant and unkempt firebrand and pamphleteer whose words helped inspire America's independence from Britain and the survival of George Washington's beleaguered Continental Army.

Paine, who died in poverty and disgrace in New York in 1809, is brought back to life twice in the play. The drama had originally ended with a deathbed scene, but a clever addendum by Thomas and Fast has Paine talking, lambasting and blaspheming past his own expiration.

If Paine lives, Citizen Tom Paine is unfortunately in limbo. It played to packed houses in Philadelphia and last week completed a successful seven-week run at Washington's Kennedy Center. But its future is uncertain as it has not received another booking.

Although he intends to return to television for a time, Thomas is disappointed that Paine is without another audience, if only temporarily. “I think it's a show the heartland would enjoy a great deal,” said Thomas, 35. “It's more important than getting it into New York. In the heartland, people won't be expecting this kind of fun thing. That's the audience it's really meant to reach. It's a popular show with a populist appeal, just as Paine himself was.”

“Of course, he breaks all the rules, and he's a very disagreeable person. He has no manners. But people enjoy seeing that on stage every now and then. I think they enjoy seeing me raise a little hell.”

To call Paine a patriotic play is not to imply a Fourth of July tableau. The unshaven, brandy-swigging, ink-stained journalist and propagandist gave short shrift to the pomposity and upper-class arrogance exhibited by many of the Founding Fathers, including such gentlemen as Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. Fast—and Thomas—bring forth this radical and sometimes roguish disrespect with force and hilarity.

Washington, for example, is not the noble general of “Crossing the Delaware” fame. His big moment with Paine comes in a drinking scene in a very cold tent, which is much closer to the real man. In the actual crossing of the Delaware, Washington sat huddled in a cloak and is reported to have spoken only the words, “Shift your arse, Knox, and trim the boat.”

Paine has received decidedly mixed early reviews from local critics. Local television's Arch Campbell, probably Washington's most popular critic, gave it a rave review. The Washington Post's David Richards called it “instructive, picturesque and well-intentioned,” but added it was “stuffed with pomposity, pretension and dialogue so ripe that, were it fruit, you wouldn't be able to see the stage for the flies.” Still, Joe Brown of the Post's “Weekend” section gave it a plus, saying Thomas “packs such fireworks into his portrait of Paine that it seems like a one-man show with a few human props.”

It is a one-man show in that the play would be absolutely impossible without Thomas, whose fire and gall keep the show going at times when it might otherwise collapse. As with Hal Holbrook and his famous portrayal of Mark Twain, Thomas has put his own stamp on the character so indelibly that one cannot imagine anyone else in the part.

Thomas Paine spends a lot of time stepping out of scenes to talk to the audience. In fact, he spends part of the time among the audience, swaggering noisily down the center aisle and up on stage at the beginning.

But rather than a flawed play, perhaps, Paine is simply a strange one. Modern critics who fault the dialogue forget how archly 18th-Century men of position spoke, and if there ever was a man for ripe invective, it was Tom Paine.

The plot is odd and occasionally disappears, but essentially it consists of Paine's life, one of the more melodramatic in history. The first act deals with his arrival in colonial America in 1774 from England, the revolutionary struggle that prompted him to write “Common Sense” and “Crisis” and his personal triumph at Revolutionary War's end.

The second half depicts the long misadventure that was his involvement in the French Revolution, his imprisonment and exile and ultimately, his death in New York, where his body was forbidden burial because of his deist tract “The Age of Reason,” which was almost universally condemned as atheistic.

If the scenes are episodic, there is really no other way to present 35 years of a man's life and confrontations with the historic likes of Benjamin Franklin and Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. Besides, most of these scenes are rousers.

“I like to play it,” said Thomas, who read all of Paine's works in preparing himself for the part. “I like to bring this man's ideas out to the public. It's not just that one is doing a play that's fun to do and fun to see. He (Paine) is reminding us of what our roots as Americans are and letting us know that radicalism is part and parcel of every great central earthquake that takes place. Certainly this country is the result of a great one.”

Thomas, a veteran stage actor whose television credits also include the lead roles in “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Red Badge of Courage,” may have the ideal solution for “Paine's” future.

“This play, I think, would work splendidly on television.”