Into the woods with Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard in thermodynamic repose.

I do love Arcadia; I've loved it ever since I read it, before I'd ever seen it.  To me, it's Tom Stoppard's best play - and certainly one of the classics of the twentieth century - even if it's not his most original, and even if I'm not really prepared to defend its achievement against such possible rivals as Travesties or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

The "trouble" with Arcadia, of course, is that it's so synthetic, and its organizing structure so brazenly borrowed from A.S. Byatt's Possession (almost as compensation, you sometimes think, the playwright offers a Stoppard-like antagonist to a Byatt-like scholar right in the middle of the script), while many of its debates, as Boston Lowbrow's Bryce Lambert points out, are stolen from James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science.  But even if by borrowed means, Stoppard conjures in Arcadia an elaborate entertainment (indeed, an old-fashioned play of ideas) that perfectly balances his frisky wit with a mournful awareness of life's terrible vicissitudes - as well as breezy discussions of not only poetry, landscape architecture, and the Romantic period, but also chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (with Fermat's Last Theorem thrown in as a kind of aperitif).

Stoppard's conceit is that even as we watch a set of academic sleuths in the present day dig about in a country manor for clues about Lord Byron (who once visited), we can simultaneously watch, through some sort of time warp, the historical record of that fateful weekend back in 1809.  Today's intellectuals rattle on about sex and the romantic imagination; little do they know their counterparts two centuries ago were consumed instead with thoughts of sex and science - largely because a mathematical prodigy was on the premises, in the person of young Thomasina Coverly (note the similarity of that first name to Stoppard's own, Tomáš - yes, his ego et in Arcadia). She was the real "genius" of the house, not Byron, although her achievements, like her short life, were lost; our true history is always a secret, Stoppard whispers (thus Thomasina's descendant in the present day won't speak at all) - even as he braids together C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities more intimately than perhaps any one else has ever managed; indeed, the playwright's final images are of the two ages (and cultures) dancing around each other in an entwined enchantment.

All this, of course, makes Arcadia quite a challenge - it requires a large, poised and articulate cast that can bring off serious debate and romantic feeling as well as high comedy (and a director who knows how to keep that delicate balance).  So it felt like a stretch for a fringe company - still, I had heard good things about the Bad Habit version (which closed, alas, last weekend - this is a post-mortem, but then that's kind of appropriate for Arcadia).  And I've often been surprised at what the fringe can do - indeed, every season a fringe show ranks in my top 10 for the year.

Greg Nussen and David Lutheran make their way through the thickets of Arcadia.

So I wasn't shocked to discover that this Arcadia was, indeed, a solid effort - wittily directed and mostly well-acted, with one or two stand-out performances.  To be honest, it was helped immensely, in my view, by being apparently acted by smart, quirky people who understood what it was about, rather than by a crowd of Equity actors attempting to simulate a professorial intelligence they didn't really have.  Alas, a few mis-castings, and one or two failures in acting energy (there was little sexual heat in this version) kept it, I think, from greatness.  Still, director Daniel Morris and his cast did well by Stoppard's ideas - and there are a lot of those in Arcadia; as should be the case with this particular play, you could feel the audience paying close attention to everything that transpired, eager to catch every multi-layered quip and witty aside (a sight not often seen at our larger stages, I'm telling you).  And I felt that the decision to produce the script on the stage of the Wimberley Theatre, in the round, proved inspired; I'd always thought of Arcadia as a proscenium show, but something about the arena staging, with its matrix of exits and entrances, resonated with the play's themes; the only thing lacking, alas (and you rarely get this anyway), was the backdrop of romantically ruined grounds that are meant to be seen outside the windows of "Sidley Park" - and which become freighted with more and more tragic meaning as the play progresses.

But this reminds me, I'm afraid, of the one great failure in Morris's otherwise astute direction - the play's final tragedy, which Stoppard never states directly (and which I can't give away without ruining the sad magic of its discovery) - didn't really coalesce in the audience's mind, I don't think, as the curtain fell (although perhaps it did after later discussion). That gap, however, was connected intimately to the production's other great gap - in the pivotal role of Thomasina's besotted tutor, Septimus Hodge, young Greg Nussen proved woefully inadequate.  Mr. Nussen is very nice to look at - and his voice is a pleasing purr; but his blandness was a constant reminder that, as they say, beauty isn't everything.  And his performance was a particular problem because Septimus Hodge is supposed to have the passionately beating, ultimately broken heart at the center of the script!

Luckily, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing - even when they weren't quite right for their respective roles - so generally the play moved forward without him. John Geoffrion, for instance (a frequent commenter on this blog, btw), brought a welcome spark to Bernard Nightingale, the egotistical, Stoppard-like Byron expert who stomps all over the work of the Byatt-like Hannah Jarvis.  Geoffrion was one of those slight miscastings in the show that worked pretty well anyway - he played Nightingale as more of a twit than a dick, and so the sexual tension between him and Jarvis went missing - but he threw himself with such eager fire into his rants on art and science that you didn't really mind.  Meanwhile, as Jarvis, Sarah Bedard didn't seem to mind the lack of tension either; Bedard is a beauty, and projected the right kind of skeptical intelligence as Jarvis, but she was always too calm for me to really believe in her slow burn - nor did I quite see her put together the script's great mystery in her head (Nightingale's thesis on Byron is an ego-driven fantasy, but Jarvis steadily works her way toward something like the truth).

Still, Bedard managed many a witty turn of phrase, and there were similarly nice turns from many in the cast.  As the smartly sluttish Lady Croom, for instance, A. Nora Long didn't convince me as a sexual raptor, but her drily rendered sarcasm was always delightful; meanwhile, Nick Chris was utterly believable as Stoppard's brilliant exponent of chaos, but didn't always have the sensitive vulnerability that surfaces now and then in the part (and which afflicts his entire eccentric family).  There were more consistently satisfying comic turns from David Lutheran, as an idiotically pompous cuckold, and especially Glen Moore, as his blowhard companion.  Meanwhile Luke Murtha was always sweetly intriguing as that silent brother.  But at the center of the production was a really spectacular turn by newcomer Alycia Sacco as the sparkling Thomasina - easily the best performance of this role I've seen out of four professional productions.  Whenever Sacco giggled, or waltzed to Chopin, or uncertainly offered a brilliant solution to an unsolved theorem, the show all but belonged to her, and you felt art and science dancing together (for a brief moment) just as Stoppard meant them to.

The houndtrap

The Publick Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (at left) is perhaps almost too smart for its own good. And maybe not quite sharp enough for its own good.

Which isn't to say this Hound isn't friendly; it's just never frisky, despite the efforts of a large chunk of Boston's best theatrical talent. The central problem is that director Diego Arciniegas has weighted the script with a rather heavy sense of its own intellectual importance - he heightens the shadow of the Theatre of the Absurd, and draws out (while actually slightly obscuring) the script's inter-textuality, and has even updated the look of Stoppard's play-within-the-play to the inter-sexuality, if you will, of Charles Ludlam. And Arciniegas has made Stoppard's meta-play so very thoroughly meta that he has even thrown in an intermission, at which I found myself peeing next to one of the script's "critics" in the john. (I admit I felt my performance of the role at that moment had an urgency his lacked.)

But clever as he is, Arciniegas seems to have forgotten that the dramatic engine of this one-act (and despite its dilation into two acts here, Hound is most definitely a one-act) is a snarky parody of Agatha Christie - her moth-eaten classic The Mousetrap in particular, which I think is still running in London after 58 years (Stoppard even ridicules, and therefore ruins, the old Dame's big twist). Yes, yes, the script is chock-a-block with then-up-to-the-minute theatrical ideas; but Hound should scamper through them like a puppy, as it's basically a long-form skit, not a seminar.

Thus, while this may be the most self-conscious Hound I've ever seen, it was far from the funniest. You could have driven a hearse through many of its cues, and to be honest, only a few in the talented cast were at their polished best. Just in case you've never seen it, the script's hook is the slow interpolation of a pair of critics (called, in classic Stoppardese, "Birdboot" and "Moon") into a ghastly murder mystery they're supposed to be reviewing. But I was surprised to see Arciniegas going easy on my benighted profession (although I know, I know, I don't really act like a professional). In any real Boston update of Hound, of course, at least one of the print critics would have to be female (the sex talk could still work, just make her from The Edge) - but even beyond that, the roles are quite a bit more wicked fun than William Gardiner and Barlow Adamson seemed to realize (and Arciniegas didn't really differentiate his critical Didi and Gogo enough, either).

Meanwhile, up on "stage," there was fine, ghoulish work from Sheridan Thomas as the aptly-named Mrs. Drudge, who does both the literal and dramatic drudgery (a typical line: "Muldoon Manor, one morning in early spring"), and the amusingly over-poised Georgia Lyman as the deathly attractive lady of the house.  Meanwhile Gabriel Kuttner and Danny Bryck knew what they were doing, but hadn't quite given it their own spin yet, and on the sidelines some supporting roles looked even more under-rehearsed.  The effectively funereal set was by Dahlia Al-Habieli, and the atmospheric (if occasionally intrusive) lighting was by Jeff Adelberg.

But one last nitpick: at a famous hinge-point in Hound, Stoppard has one of his critics actually step onto the stage to answer a telephone that's mysteriously ringing (even though we know the line has been cut) - at which point all ontological hell breaks loose, and the critics are suddenly "embedded" in the play they've been watching.  Here, however, Arciniegas has his scribbler answer his cell at the last moment - a funny jab at local reviewers who forget to turn off their digital devices, it's true; but doesn't this subtly undermine Stoppard's intent?  I thought so; a better solution to the problem of "updating" this moment of inter-text (if it must be updated) might be to have the critic's cell ring first, and then be "taken over," as it were, by the phone onstage.  Just a thought from Mr. Moon here.

Lions in winter

The three befuddled Heroes at Merrimack Rep.

We never find out whether the fading veterans of Gérald Sibleyras's Heroes (now through Dec. 13 at the Merrimack Rep) were, indeed, actually heroes in the Great War, which threw them together some forty years before the action of the play. But the point is that they are heroes now, facing as grim an enemy as any they faced in the trenches. Indeed it's the same enemy: death, put simply, which sits in wait for them just beyond the sunny, nursing-home patio on which they're playing out their last days. But Sibleyras - a successful French dramatist and screenwriter not much heard of in the States - doesn't dwell on the inevitable so much as suggest it, in a winsome meditation on the limits of life - and indeed all our lives - that succeeds (sometimes despite itself) in the Merrimack's sweet but superficial production.

Sibleyras imagines his three old soldiers in a new kind of trench - their patio is down in a hot little valley, from which they can just see a distant stand of poplars nodding in the breeze (the play's original title was Le vent des Peupliers, "The Wind in the Poplars"). The days pass, summer declines into fall, and our three heroes, Henri, Gustave, and Philippe, decline too; Phillipe's fainting attacks, the result of shrapnel lodged in his brain, grow more frequent, and he and Gustave (who's terrified of the outside world) begin to share a folie à deux about the stone dog guarding their terrace. Phillipe has other delusions as well: he's quite sure, for instance, that the nun who runs the place is polishing off veterans in order to streamline her birthday party calendar.

As you might guess, of this trio Henri has the firmest grip on 'reality,' and whatever tension develops depends on his awareness that his friends are living in a kind of deepening dream; whether to fight it, or fly with it, is the slight script's only open question. Their recurrent fantasies are of battling for freedom - an escape to that stand of poplars, for instance (below) - and, unsurprisingly, sex. Those offended by Gallic romantic attitudes are here forewarned; these charming old duffs frankly rhapsodize about bringing women to climax, as well as making them laugh (one dreams of doing both at once). What poignantly undercuts the strut of these aging cockerels, of course, is the fact that, as one laments, none of them has had "an erection worthy of the name" for months.


Equipped to ford a nearby stream, the heroes of Heroes head for their beloved poplars.

One is reminded that the tramps in Waiting for Godot have much the same problem, and as translated (and trimmed) by Tom Stoppard, Heroes hints at something of Beckett's physical, if not spiritual, devastation. And it's that slight edge of decrepitude - which should, admittedly, be delicately rendered - that the Merrimack misses. The actors of this production (two of whom performed the piece earlier in New York) are all too vital to fully mine the pathos of the script. After all, unlike Beckett's tramps, these three are not so much concerned with the afterlife as with life itself, to which they are trying to hang onto any which way they can - and in an ideal production we should see them wither ever so slightly despite their best efforts.

Yet even with one character's lame leg, and another's frequent fainting spells, the general atmosphere at Merrimack was hale and hearty. This worked fine for the comedy, but left the poignance to be sketched in at particular moments by director Carl Forsman, when it should have suffused, and infused, everything. And speaking of infusion - I was rather surprised that the two actors from New York, Ron Holgate - who's won a Tony - and Jonathan Hogan, felt no further "inside" their characters than newcomer Kenneth Tigar. Holgate and Hogan were working more subtly than Tigar, it's true, but all were operating technically - and Hogan was unable to suggest the growing severity of Phillipe's attacks, or his deepening mania. Holgate offers probably the most satisfying performance - but even here, the edge of Gustave's inner terror was somehow missing.

Yet if this is not quite an ideal production of Heroes, it's nevertheless often an effective one - to which the Merrimack audience responded warmly. Sibleyras hasn't penned a masterpiece (for one thing it wraps far too abruptly), but he has a genuine voice - Stoppard hasn't rendered him as "Stoppard" - as well as the kind of light, yet serious touch that's becoming rare in the theatre these days. And if the Merrimack Heroes is a tad too broad, it's nevertheless affecting and sympathetic in a way it seems only the stage can be; I found its mood lingering in my mind for days after the performance. And a new play with that kind of effect is something to give thanks for.

Has Tom Stoppard gone soft?

Lenin, meet Lennon: René Augesen and Manoel Felciano in Rock 'n' Roll.

Sometimes the set at the Huntington is better than the play it was designed for. At least I'm afraid that's the case with Rock 'n' Roll, this year's model from Tom Stoppard, on the theatre's main stage through December 13. Douglas W. Schmidt's set is fantastic - a gray, Communist-era courtyard, turned on its side so we're gazing up, as if from its drab floor, at a bright patch of empty sky. Here, in a nutshell, is Stoppard's hook: the promise of freedom that rock 'n' roll has always held for anyone, anywhere, trapped in a life of denial.

But then the play starts, and Schmidt's beautiful sketch of an idea slowly drifts through an exegesis so muddled and self-mythologizing that you have to wonder:

Has Tom Stoppard gone soft?

Now I know what you've heard from the other critics: that in this play the author balances his "heart" with his "head." Not really. Oh, the head is chattering away as ever, but basically, whatever the "heart" - or rather the ego - wants it gets in this sometimes witty, and sometimes touching, but ultimately silly pseudo-intellectual epic. And what that heart wants is to imagine that by listening to Syd Barrett and the Rolling Stones, the baby boomers - or perhaps Tom Stoppard himself - brought down the Berlin Wall. Yes, Stoppard has actually borrowed the theme of Rock 'n' Roll from Hairspray (although the conceit of that musical probably had more validity).

But first, a little background. Stoppard's plays (the author, at left) have always been a mix of critique and pastiche - the big ideas in them always came from other people. At his best, however, the playwright conjured stage metaphors for this recycled content that glittered almost as brilliantly as the borrowed ideology. Re-imagining modernism via Oscar Wilde, for instance, is savage and inspired (Travesties), while the landscape that slowly reveals the tension between classicism and romanticism comes to seem heartbreaking (Arcadia).

But eventually Stoppard's method hardened into formula: pull together a group of intellectuals (Lenin, Joyce, A.E. Houseman, Magritte, Bakunin, whoever), find a forum in which they can all intersect (a country house, Zurich, the text of Hamlet), and then set the Oxford Union top spinning (although surprisingly, Stoppard never attended university; like Shaw, he's an autodidact). The results were often dazzling, but it's also been true that when it comes to his own deep desires, Stoppard could suddenly be a little stupid: in Arcadia, for instance, the author insisted that sex would somehow overcome the power of entropy because - well, just because, that's why; because otherwise it would be really too bad.

And alas, much of Rock 'n' Roll is devoted to similarly wishful thinking, much of it driven, perhaps, by regrets regarding his own biography. Born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard was spirited out of the country soon after the Nazis marched in and didn't return until the late 70s. Yet despite this family history of dodging fascism (or perhaps because of it) Stoppard at first insisted proudly on his prerogative to be completely apolitical as a writer: ""I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application," he said early in his career. "They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness."

But it seems a longing for usefulness began to creep up on the playwright anyway. He met Václav Havel in the late seventies, and began to speak out about civil rights abuses in Eastern Europe and in general. And political content - generally anti-Communist, and extolling individual rights - began to appear in works like Dogg's Hamlet/Cahoot's Macbeth.

Now, in Rock 'n' Roll, we have a forced union of these two personae - the apolitical libertarian becomes, in effect, the accidental revolutionary. Stoppard's alter ego in the play, Jan, bounces back and forth between Cambridge and Czechoslovakia, arguing for apolitical individualism with England's academic left, all the while becoming more and more drawn to the underground Czech rock scene, his true passion. But alas, his fave band, the Plastic People of the Universe, are eventually arrested, and Jan along with them, because the fact that they blow their minds via secondhand psychedelia is somehow considered a threat to the state (perhaps because such inward noodling refuses to even acknowledge the state).

Years pass; through various slightly-boring intrigues (some involving the Cambridge leftists he once opposed), Jan is freed. And then eventually, Czechoslovakia is freed, too, in the "Velvet Revolution" following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jan once again hooks up (à la Howards End) with the daughter of his opponents in Cambridge, in an atmosphere of tentative, slightly fatuous, mutual forgiveness. And the Rolling Stones play Prague. Rock 'n' roll triumphs. The end.


An early Floyd hit, "See Emily Play," with Barrett goofing on guitar.

And if history were really as simple as the lyrics on a single, Rock 'n' Roll might be convincing in its passion and its pretensions. But alas, it's not. Of course, along the way, there have been many conversations on politics in the incisive Stoppard manner, some ironically diverting, some less so - but the author's overriding theme seems to be that the "spirit" of rock 'n' roll, rather than any particular ideology or course of action, brought down the Wall. What's more, that "spirit" seems to have been embodied most purely in the person of Syd Barrett, one of the founders - and christener (he dreamed up the name) - of Pink Floyd (see above). After contributing much to Floyd's techno-psychedelic sound, however, Barrett sank into psychological instability (see below) and had to be ejected from its ranks - a trauma which inspired much of the band's best work on Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here (itself a guilty valentine to Barrett). And now Stoppard has hopped aboard this particular meme, perhaps sensing it could be bent in the service of his usual method, and worked Barrett into the background of his play (Barrett lived in Cambridge until his death; here, the characters are obsessed with him, and he even makes a cameo, perched like Pan on a garden wall).


A very-cute Barrett trips out on magic mushrooms in this home movie.

The insinuation seems to be that it was actually Syd Barrett rather than, say, Václav Havel (or Mikhail Gorbachev!) who brought freedom to Eastern Europe. Which is a sweet, old-fashioned notion that the sharp, old-fashioned Stoppard would have torn to shreds (hence, it's always insinuated rather than actually stated). True, rock 'n' roll's individualism had a particular resonance in Czechoslovakia (its "Lennon Wall" - evoked in photo at top - stood for years as an anti-Communist pop protest). And true too, Syd Barrett was a major figure in rock 'n' roll. And - gasp - Pink Floyd even put out a post-Barrett album called (wait for it) The Wall. But Stoppard's thesis is, alas, rather like seeing the face of Jesus in a piece of toast on eBay - he pulls together three suggestive coincidences, adds a half-baked case against reductionism (via a touching, but dubious, discussion of the mind-body problem) - and voilà! You're a hero if you bought The Piper at the Gates of Dawn!

Only funny, communists still control China, despite the fact that the Stones keep going through the motions in stadiums across the globe. And after the Velvet Revolution, the Czech Republic rocked on, but sans Slovakia, while much of Eastern Europe melted down economically - and today Russia is essentially held together as a quasi-dictatorship floating on petrodollars. Why can't Syd fix that? And don't Rush Limbaugh - and neo-Nazi skinheads - love rock 'n' roll too? Yes, I think they do, along with ne'er-do-wells the world over. So it's a funny thing, this idea of a "world spirit" of rock - it may match up to the disparate points of personal biography Stoppard has assembled, but does the resulting pastiche really conjure the wider vision of his earlier work? No, not nearly. In fact, I'd argue, it only conjures a nostalgic illusion - and a very narrow one at that, and nowhere more reductive than in its vision of rock 'n' roll itself. Even though the show covers two decades, its soundtrack is almost entirely limited to bands playing during the Prague Spring (essentially the Microsoft version of rock); there's no room in Stoppard's history for punk, or funk, or metal or grunge - well, the list goes on. I suppose you could justify this in terms of the fact that Czechoslovakia seems to have seen rock as frozen in 1968, too - but really, what can you say about a playwright who calls Syd Barrett "the great god Pan" except, "Has he never heard of Prince?"

Okay, so Rock 'n' Roll is a big love letter to self-centered boomers and their 60s-era rock tastes disguised as a thoughtful play. Still, on the bright side, Stoppard has made the disguise pretty elaborate, and the Huntington puts the dialogue over with intelligence, and even at times inspiration, and has dressed the play up beautifully (that set keeps doing wonderful things). And the production features one superb turn, from René Augesen, that is, simply put, the best performance of the Boston season; every actor and actress in this town should see this show, if only to see, once and for all, How It's Done. Please bring back Ms. Augesen in a better play, ye Huntington gods, and as soon as possible, too; if I could see her in Shakespeare, Shaw or Chekhov, I'd die happy. Elsewhere the large cast is a bit more variable, but never below a high standard. Jack Willis manages to keep the part of the blowhard Marxist going, even though Stoppard doesn't give him any top-drawer arguments to make (to be fair, I'm sure there are members of the British left who approximate this character). A somewhat more serious problem registers in the central performance of Manoel Felciano as Jan - Mr. Felciano is a talented actor, but perhaps not quite charismatic enough to hold us through the rambling scenes Stoppard has devised for him (he's not helped by Carey Perloff's slightly vague direction).

And if I sound particularly riled by what I think of as the "bad faith" of Rock 'n' Roll, perhaps that's because the play really couldn't come at a worse time. The heyday of Stoppard's aesthetic position - that of the navel-gazing, hard-rocking libertarian - has suddenly ended. Like so many gods before it, libertarianism has failed, and failed utterly - just check out the Dow Jones if you doubt me. These days everyone is looking toward some revision of the leftist tropes of the New Deal for salvation - and no one more so than the free market players who once used libertarianism for political cover (if the play had one more scene, set in 2008, imagine what an ironic coda it would make!). Tellingly, Syd Barrett (at left, near the end of his life) died just after Rock 'n' Roll premiered in London. If I were Stoppard, I'd take that as an omen.

Talkin' bout a revolution

Nigel Gore and Molly Schreiber debate the Travesties of modernism.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but you'd have to have been as blind as James Joyce not to have seen that Zurich in 1916 was the place to be. Nestled in the lap of Swiss neutrality as the belle epoque blew up around it, Zurich was crowded with the likes of Kandinsky, Klee, de Chirico, Ernst, Arp, and, of course Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin - whose (hypothetically) crossed paths form the crux of Travesties, Tom Stoppard's dazzling meditation on, and cross-examination of, modernism.

For make no mistake, Zurich's tiny teapot would pour a cultural tempest on the world as "the war to end all wars" wound down. Lenin would escape via sealed train to the Finland Station in 1917; Joyce would begin to unleash his über-Bildungsroman, Ulysses, in 1918; and Tristan Tzara, the founder of "Dada," would - well, actually Zurich proved to be his finest hour, but his anarchic manifesti manifested themselves for years via his surrealist comrades (indeed, he may, in the end, cast the longest cultural shadow of this trio).

But Stoppard engages these titans much as he did Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - by sending amongst them a nobody, albeit an actual nobody, named Henry Carr, a minor official who starred in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at a theatre whose manager was none other than Joyce (at left, in a photo taken in Zurich). The two sparred over money, with Carr suing Joyce, and Joyce counter-suing Carr (tellingly, the affair was over a pair of pants) - and Tzara and Lenin were in the neighborhood, after all, so Stoppard mixes all of them up in a fantasia based in the loosey-goosiest of fashions on Earnest, as it's re-enacted in flashback via the addled brain of the now-ancient Carr.

If this all sounds a bit Oxbridge-precious, well - perhaps it is; but it's dazzlingly Oxbridge-precious, because Stoppard is so lavishly witty, and his erudition so deep and yet worn so lightly. (Who else could have Lenin intone, "To lose one revolution may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness"?) What's more, Stoppard darts easily from the role of artiste to philistine: Carr may be a stuffed shirt and a prig, but he gives as good as he gets, and we can sense his outrage is a cover for the author's own skepticism.

For after all, even the title of Travesties can be taken any number of ways - is Stoppard ridiculing the artists he has in his sights, or instead only revelling in their work as the travesties they intended, and the Henry Carrs of the world insisted they were? Remember even Forster thought Ulysses was an attempt "to smear shit on the universe," (it is a kind of highbrow burlesque), Tzara endured no end of abuse, and Lenin (at right, on his arrival in Finland) twisted Marxism so far from its foundations as to all but parody it - and as for its practical effect on the world, well . . . that's both a travesty and a tragedy. Even the use of Earnest is itself a deep joke; after all, Wilde's comedy is a weirdly rarefied satire of Tory morals - precisely the worldview that modernism ridiculed and attempted to reform. To subject modernism itself to the same tropes - well, let's just say some might regard that as a tragedy. Or a travesty. Whatever - as in whatever you make of the wreckage of modernism's reformist ideals, it's not unlike the flickering chaos of Henry Carr's brain.

At any rate, under the direction of Diego Arciniegas, Stoppard's hall of intellectual mirrors is kept merrily spinning, and even if the cast isn't dazzling enough to disguise the lack of momentum in his ad hoc script, they put over the electrifying play of his ideas. (Once again we find the theatre scene's real intellectual life being sustained by its small companies rather than its large ones.) Of the central triumvirate, I was most taken with the Tzara of Alejandro Simoes, whose energy is consistently charming, even if he channels the Marx Brothers' anarchy-lite more than the darker fatalism of Tzara (whose pseudonym roughly translates as "sad country"). But I found Gabriel Kuttner's Lenin (another pseudonym, btw; his given name was Vladimir Ulyanov) a bit too placid, and Derry Woodhouse's Joyce not nearly testy or eccentric enough. And as senile ringmaster Carr, Nigel Gore tended to roar rather than explore the down-and-out loose ends of his character's senescence. There's bright work around the edges of the production, though: Lynn Guerra and Molly Schreiber ably chirp their way through the roles of Carr's Wildean factota, Gwendolen and Cecily (even when they're bopping about like mechanical dolls, or stripping á la some slightly sexist Monty Python sketch). Perhaps my favorite performance, however, came from Lorna Noguiera as Lenin's wife Nadya, whose best lines, of course, go "Da . . . da . . . da, da, da!" (Or yes I said yes, for you Joyceans.) The voice of modernity indeed.