Jamie Jackson Photo by Russ Rowland

In the printed program, cleverly laid out like a New York Post page, Krebs calls the play "a marvelous jigsaw of a drama." We'll agree with the jigsaw part. A goulash of casually related or utterly disparate vignettes, it attempts to cram the Australian media mogul's 94 years into 90 minutes, focusing on key events and one childhood memory in particular that won't shut up. That's young Rupert, born to a well-off Melbourne newspaper editor and a doting but strict mother, climbing a tree and yelling, "Father, I'm up here! look at me! Can you see me? I'm almost at the top!" A simple enough metaphor for the young Murdoch's ambition and desire to please a distracted father, rather like what we keep hearing about Trump. We don't need to go through it three times.

The basic premise has Murdoch reluctantly agreeing to an interview with the mysterious Chodrum Trepur (spell it backwards), a TV talk show host who has done his homework. At first effusively fawning, his questions get tougher, and Murdoch balks at them, but he does reel out a lot of personal history. Trepur promises to divide the interview into six newspaper-like sections: headline, local news (Rupert's beginnings), international (his global conquests), business, politics and opinion, and marriage and relationships. And a bonus section, letters to the editor, such as: "There is no one more responsible for the pollution of our press, and the pollution of our political life and our cynicism and misperception of reality that's destroying us." That's an actual quote, from Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven author Dennis Potter, and he wrote it two years before Murdoch founded Fox News.

Murdoch, Trepur, and everyone else are portrayed by Jamie Jackson. (A stage manager–Sam Vartholomeous, though he's unbilled–also appears frequently to hand out props and otherwise assist.) A respected performer with numerous Broadway and off-Broadway credits, he's Australian, so he gets the accent right. But the constant shifting of the landscape beneath him might be too much for any actor.

The awkwardness begins immediately: How do you play interviewer and interviewee? Jackson sits on a chair (modest set design by Peter R. Feuchtwanger) and tilts stage right for Trepur and stage left for Murdoch, rotating this way and that on every exchange; I don't know how he doesn't get dizzy. And he's better in some roles than others.

A fair amount of the time we don't know who the heck he is, because the nameless author hasn't provided enough hints, nor has Christopher Scott, the director. But if that's him in the floppy wig on the screen (projections and video design, rather elaborate and well-timed for video-live interplay, by Andy Evan Cohen) pretending to be JFK, he's a terrible JFK. He's somewhat more in his element as Murdoch's powerful but stammering father; a vulgar, mob-boss-like Roger Ailes; and Frederick Hayek, the Austrian economist-philosopher who keeps popping up and seems completely irrelevant, except for asserting to Murdoch that "it is, as it were, the lowest common denominator which unites the largest number of people." Words to live by, if you're running Fox.

Some interesting tidbits do surface. The young Murdoch had leftist elements; his father, and a sudden collegiate interest in Lenin, cured him of that. The older one claims to abide by his mother's words, "always tell the truth," which triggered giggles from the audience. Asked by Trepur what he'd like for a legacy, he hopes it will be "that I championed freedom and changed things for the better." His many wives get short shrift, as do his relationships with his six kids.

But most of it is so scattershot. He's a five-year-old drowning in an ocean liner pool, his mother's way of teaching him to swim. He's on Fleet Street, gobbling up newspapers and festooning them with loud headlines and bare breasts (some excruciating puns from Trepur here: "If mammaries serve, you were arousing titters up and down Fleet Street. Those two papers had gone bust"). He's applying for U.S. citizenship, mainly to influence the Reagan administration to wipe out the Fairness Doctrine and allow cross-media ownership. And he's constantly interrupted by a recording of countertenor Sean Patrick Doyle rendering a setting of W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming," to purposes unknown.

We don't know what to grab onto. And we leave not knowing Murdoch much better than we did when we came in. The man's been in the news lately: He designated Lachlan as heir apparent, ensuring that News Corp will remain a bastion of conservatism. The Trump administration sued his Wall Street Journal for its exposé of the Jeffrey Epstein 50th birthday book. And the White House has requested that he testify quickly, citing his "age and health."

Some of that up-to-the-minute Murdoch news appears here, reminding us of his huge influence on not just journalism but public discourse, social media, and the deep left-right divide. But whatever Murdoch: The Final Interview is trying to say, it's ultimately as tongue-tied as Murdoch's father. The Post may be a poisonous rag, Fox News a cesspool of slant. But they do have one advantage over this play: they're clear.