Stoppard @ ACT
*Relentless Cleverness*/Play Review/: Travesties, /by Tom Stoppard, at the American
Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), //San Francisco//./
Had enough of the mud-slinging crudities and simplistic over-certainties
of the 2006 election cycle? Then try /Travesties /as an antidote.
This hyper-refined and resolutely inconclusive play of ideas pits
artistic and political revolutionaries against radical conservatives.
Each side gets its fair share of rhetorical dazzle and endearingly
slapstick /shtick/. Yet author Stoppard remains above the partisan fray,
never taking sides.
Instead, he leaves the polemicizing to his three historic stars:
founding Bolshevik V.I. Lenin, avant-garde Irish novelist James Joyce
and dada send-up artist Tristan Tzara. All three nurse revolutionary
visions that are mutually exclusive.
Lenin aims to harness all classes, including "arts workers," to the
urgent historical imperative of a total societal makeover. For Joyce, on
the other hand, artistic achievement is the only justifiable /raison
d'être/ for the otherwise meaningless "nightmare" of history. Tzara, for
his part, is a scissor-wielding artistic anarchist with his own recipe
for poetic "freshness" – slice all texts into snippets so they can
randomly rearrange themselves.
Coincidentally, in 1917, all three of these revolutionary icons happened
to be waiting out World War I in neutral Zurich, although there is no
evidence that they actually interacted. To bring them into
juxtaposition, Stoppard invokes a fourth co-star: one Henry Carr, a
historic non-entity who also happened to live in Zurich at the time as a
totally undistinguished British consul.
Carr is far more interested in his own wardrobe than in the maelstrom of
the Great War, with its swirling political and intellectual headwinds.
He's militantly incurious, as radical in his know-nothing conservativism
as the other three are in their revolutionary zeal.
Just to mix things up, Stoppard lets Carr and Tzara haunt the same
Zurich library in pursuit of Cecily and Gwendolyn, a pair of
bluestocking bookworms. And he makes Carr's butler a closet Leninist.
Then he has Joyce, as a fund-raising ploy, recruit Carr to star in an
amateur theatrical production of Oscar Wilde's /Importance of Being
Earnest/.
If all this makes no logical sense, never mind. The whole point is to
set up an epigrammatic dialectic between the protagonists' clashing
ideologies. And anyway, the action is framed as a series addled
flashbacks in the recollection of a senile Carr nearly half a century
after the fact.
Geordie Johnson, as Carr, shuttles with ease across the age divide,
equally at home as a dotty dotard or a callow dandy. Just as fatuous as
the young Carr is Gregory Wallace's Tzara, whose dada provocations seem
no more than the bratty mannerisms of a spoiled rich kid. The banter
between these two fops liberally echoes /The Importance of Being
Earnest/, an allusion reinforced by the saccharine bitchiness of Cecily
and Gwendolyn (Allison Jean White and Rene Augeson), who are even named
after Wilde's female leads.
Master mime Geoff Hoyle juggles two roles with aplomb: as Lenin, he's by
turns a shabby émigré or a charismatic firebrand. Then, after a
lightning costume switch, he turns into Carr's self-effacing valet,
mouthing incendiary Bolshevik dogma with unflappably servile decorum.
Anthony Fusco plays Joyce with a myopic squint, lilting brogue and
diffident slouch that all belie the character's acerbic insight and
implacable egotism. As far as the Irish genius is concerned, the most
important event of the war decade is /Ulysses/.
To fully savor a lot of the play's "in" jokes, it helps to know your way
around Joyce's masterpiece, as well as Wilde's /Earnest/ and even
Lenin's /Critique of Imperialism/. Stoppard is not just showing off with
these allusions. They speak to one of his key themes: that humans and
their historic legacies are as mercurial as texts, in a constant flux of
reinterpretation.
So Carr's senile recollections shuffle the deck of canonical "reality"
just as radically as Tzara's scissors. Even the visual aspects – Douglas
Schmidt's sets and Robert Wierzel's lighting – reinforce the allusive
subtexts of the play, quoting period idioms that range from the pastel
"floating world" of dada artist Rene Magritte to the stolid Red kitsch
of Soviet "socialist realism."
A play this relentlessly clever could all too easily wear audiences down
over the course of two acts, but A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff
– a veteran of half a dozen Stoppard productions in San Francisco –
paces /Travesties / lightly enough for us to enjoy the jokes without
getting bogged down in the footnotes. Not to be missed.
Labels: Reviews
