Illumination night

Amanda Fulks ponders the cost/benefit ratio of her life with Joe Lanza in Skylight.

People often ask me, "What's the must-see show in town?" and sometimes we're lucky enough that it's hard to answer. But right now there's no competition: Skylight, by David Hare, at the Merrimack Rep, is the must-see show in town, no question.

Only it's not quite "in town;" seeing it means schlepping up to Lowell. And, I admit, the production's not perfect. Still, it's worth the trip, if only as a reminder of the kind of intellectual stimulus we almost never get from our university theatres, or really any of our theatres here in the "Athens of America;" indeed, my last local theatrical brain-rush I think came from the Merrimack, too, with A Delicate Balance last spring. How is it this little house in the boondocks manages to do what Harvard and BU can't? I really don't know, but maybe Diane Paulus and Peter DuBois could make the trek up to Lowell to find out.

And maybe you should, too (while you're up there, eat at La Boniche, that should take the edge off). But be prepared to have your cultural assumptions challenged rather than massaged, even if (admit it) current events are making our cultural assumptions ring a little hollow these days - indeed, it's a shock to realize that Skylight, which directly engages our once-happy-go-lucky free-market mindset, actually dates from 1996. That's twelve years ago. And American playwrights still haven't caught up to it, probably because "political" American authors are generally in knots over formal experimentation, while I find over and over again that very traditional forms - like Hare's classic, naturalistic two-hander - are much better at holding the mirror up to our changing natures with a minimum of fuss. And then British authors in general, from the Victorians on down, have always been better than Americans at showing how money shapes character (which in America is something of a taboo - unless things end tragically, as in Fitzgerald and Dreiser).

Indeed, Hare is very much in the tradition of Balzac (ok, he's French) and Trollope - he's fascinated with how the idealist in each of us finds his or her way in an all-too-material world. In Skylight, as in Plenty and The Secret Rapture, said idealism is personified in a woman, and its opposing animus in a man - in particular, in the person of defiant schoolteacher Kyra (Amanda Fulks), who years ago walked out of a cozy affair - and business relationship - with successful restaurateur Tom (Christopher McHale) when their extra-curricular activities were discovered by his wife (who, intriguingly, was also Kyra's best friend). Since then, Kyra has devoted herself to teaching the urban poor (rather than handling Tom's dough as well as his you-know-what), while the ever-richer restaurateur watched his long-suffering wife die of cancer (she spent her last days gazing up at the eponymous skylight, which he had built for her). Now Tom's back - he's preceded by a pleading visit from his son - to half-beg, and half-demand, Kyra's return to his side, and they spend a long night of the soul, like so many symbolic theatrical couples before them, pondering whether that rapprochement is, indeed, possible.

It's a neat set-up, and most of the local reviews have concentrated on its melodramatic, guilty-passion dynamic - will Kyra return to the arms of her lost love (at left)? Or will she kick him out on his selfish capitalist ass? This is a solid hook for a review - and to be fair, it's a clear component of, and limit on, Hare's form - but alas, it's precisely at the level of soap opera that the Merrimack production wobbles; there's simply not enough sexual chemistry between this happy uncouple to convince us of their sudden, impulsive tryst, largely because actor McHale doesn't exude the sexy-ugly vibe that the original Tom, Michael Gambon, all but personified (McHale's no matinee idol, but he's still too good-looking!).

It's rather at the level of philosophical inquiry that the Merrimack team takes flight; director Towers has beautifully articulated the play's arguments, and actors Fulks and McHale give both sides of the debate their passionate commitment. The resulting rhetorical attacks leave the theatre deep in that silence that only comes from collective thought - my idea of theatrical heaven, by the way. We begin to wonder, in a sense, what have we been thinking all these years? Why, indeed, do capitalists see human beings as commodities, and why have we colluded with them in their delusion that "greed is good" and that they're engaged in "the creation of wealth"? On the other hand, why does anyone, anywhere, suffer the privations that come with charity, if success in our culture is indeed only judged materially? It's no secret which side of this debate the author favors (he even gives Kyra a charming valedictory at the finish) - still, Hare gives the blandishments of libertarian capitalism their due, and then some; indeed, he perhaps better limns the needy, almost infantile energy of the successful businessman than he does the tightly-wound determination of his heroine.

Although at the Merrimack, Amanda Fulks expertly disguised this slight internal fudge with a no-nonsense performance of damaged, but still defiant, moral authority (and she neatly incorporated between her emotional and intellectual cues the actual cooking of a real spaghetti supper). Meanwhile co-star Christopher McHale matched her emotional power beat for beat, with an often incendiary level of arrogant energy that was nevertheless clearly running on empty. I'm afraid I found Joe Lanza, in a framing device as Tom's son, a little too rat-a-tat in his delivery, but he still projected an appropriately confused emotional naïveté, and the physical production was likewise always apt. Scenic designer Bill Clarke brought a genuinely lived-in authenticity to Kyra's pathetic (and un-heated) flat, which lighting designer Dan Kotlowitz subtly warmed with a faint glow from above - perhaps from that metaphoric skylight, which Hare clearly intends as a metaphor for any goal beyond the self. I suppose, though, that those shafts of light should also count as a metaphor for the intelligent illumination that Charles Towers and the Merrimack Rep have brought to bear on this challenging play.

Monster mash

It's actually a little hard to remember when The Mystery of Irma Vep (left), and the work of Charles Ludlam in general, were considered transgressive. Were the 70's and 80's really so long ago? I can remember Ludlam's original Ridiculous Theatre Company - although I didn't catch Vep - and the tacky valor of its trashy horror-movie declarations of gay identity even as the AIDS virus staged a real horror movie all around us (Ludlam would die of the disease only a year after his masterpiece's close). Of course Ludlam wasn't the only one responsible for the mix of campy drag, classic film references, and arch stagecraft that came to define a certain defiantly gay sensibility - but he produced one of its avatars in Vep, which made him a fortune and then went on to a long afterlife on the regional theatre circuit.

Yes, The Mystery of Irma Vep is now a family show, just another piece of outsider-goth pop culture, probably because its faggotry is always kept (slightly) under wraps; unlike the work of Ryan Landry's fabulous Gold Dust Orphans, who carry Ludlam's torch to ever-raunchier heights, Vep never gets too raw, and straight folks generally love it - which is, in a way, a kind of progress, I suppose. Perhaps some even get the show's mocking self-portraiture: the men-women, were-folk and other changelings (i.e., queers) who people its freak show are, in the end, no more genuinely frightening than Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff; Ludlam essentially turns hetero horror at homosexuality on its head. Of course, given a good production, most folks are simply laughing too hard to care about that.

Which is basically the aim of the Lyric Stage's Spiro Veloudos, who has directed the show as a holiday hoot and nothing more - much like November, this theatre's last production, which was supposed to be some kind of conservative-treatise-blah-blah-blah, but in the end was merely a yukfest. Not that there's anything wrong with that - farce has always been a Lyric specialty. And even if this production feels a little, well, denatured of its queerness, I have to admit it delivers laughs, and lots of them.

Still, while the show's talented stars, John Kuntz and Neil A. Casey, have the comic chops to tear through the eight characters, two genders, several species, and umpteen costume changes the show requires, neither has quite the outsized drag presence to put over its only intermittently-sparkling first act. In fact, oddly enough, both are at their best when they're in pants: Kuntz (who's doing characters) brings a morbid dash to the grave-robbing Lord Edgar, and Casey (who's happily goofing) is happiest when he's channeling Peter Lorre as an Egyptian guide. When they're in frocks, alas, their level of comic invention slightly drops. But then since Vep is a pastiche of a pastiche - it's Rebecca mashed with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, along with a werewolf, vampire, and mummy movie (not to mention stretches of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Poe) - perhaps it simply takes a while for its many little comic gears to lock into place. Once that happens, however - the magic moment occurs somewhere around the time Kuntz and Casey descend into the mummy's tomb via the old Indian "rope trick" (above right) - the party does definitely get started, and from then Vep is one long giddy comic romp, which for me hit a high note with its hilarious "dueling dulcimers" smackdown.

Precision and speed are of course the keys to keeping Irma kicking, and luckily the Lyric production is generally a well-oiled machine (its three costume assistants, without whom all those quick changes would be impossible, take a well-earned bow along with the stars). Brynna Bloomfield's set is just about perfect with its secret panels and creepy portraits with eyes that follow you everywhere (I only wished for some hint of the moors beyond the French windows), and costumer Gail Astrid Buckley has found clever ways to tuck whole costumes inside one another. A special nod should go to Dewey Dellay, whose spooky score maps brilliantly to Ludlam's potpourri of sources. I'd never thought of The Mystery of Irma Vep as a cup of Christmas cheer, but it's not too far from a Dickensian ghost story, now is it? So drink up, and never mind if the brew tastes - well, still a little queer . . .

How do you write about the blogosphere . .

. . . without actually writing about the blogosphere? Well, the Globe gives a pretty good answer with its Magazine's recent "Sixty-four websites on Boston life that you should know." The piece is rife with the kind of log-rolling one would expect, along with the usual prejudice toward the web as merely a wider net for calendar listings. If a thoughtful blogger is actually on the list, it's usually because he or she also writes for a print outlet (like Greg Cook - alas, that goes for less-thoughtful bloggers too). If the blogger (like moi) is critical of the dead-tree types - or offers deeper analysis than the print media can supply - then somehow, surprisingly, that blog is not one "you should know about." Tellingly, few of the "nicer" theatre blogs that are prone to actual thought (like Art Hennessey's) made the list, either. Because what Globe reader is interested in actual thought?

Here's to large endowments . . .

Boston theatre could use a bigger one.

Pat Gabridge (a talented local writer with whom I tangled here) has an interesting suggestion on his blog regarding a Boston Theatre Endowment.

Of love and war, once more

Jennifer O'Connor and Samson Kohanski in Mary's Wedding.

I owe Whistler in the Dark a few notes on their latest, Mary's Wedding, which plays upstairs at the Calderwood through this weekend. I've dragged my feet on walking down the aisle with Mary, however, because I really don't have too much to say about her. I suppose I could be outraged that the Whistlers - long an idealistic bastion of provocative new work - have gone all commercial on me, but I don't blame them (somehow I'm not surprised Howard Barker wasn't paying the bills!).

And to be honest, it's hard to resist the simple, okay, clichéd, charms of Mary. Many may be shocked to discover that I'm a sucker for honest sentiment, but I am, and author Stephen Massicotte knows just how to spin time-tested narrative threads into a delicate yarn of love and war, with a tone that approximately crosses The Glass Menagerie with Our Town.

The play has a slight postmodern gloss, in that it's all happening within Mary's head, but don't worry, this narrative trick is only milked for tears, not formal experimentation, and nothing very surreal or psychologically revealing bubbles up from Mary's subconscious, anyhow. Instead, her "dream" follows roughly the arc of many an honorable wartime tearjerker - and we are, after all, still in a time of war (remember that?). Young Mary, an uppercrust Brit newly arrived on Canada's shores, and her equally young love, Charlie, a handsome innocent who's a crack horseman, meet cute in a thunderstorm (cue foreshadowing), and are soon enjoying bareback horse rides together and reading aloud from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and "The Lady of Shallott" (ohmigod, cue more foreshadowing!). Surprisingly enough, Mary's mother wants nothing to do with this lowly, if hunky, young man, but before that recycled plot can get started, the Great War intervenes, and Charlie is sent to the vasty fields of France with Canada's famous horse brigades. From then on, there really isn't a single surprise in the script, but Massicotte's touch is so light, and his feeling for his secondhand tropes so genuine, that the play never really feels like hackwork; it feels instead like the welcome return of a familiar flower you'd thought had perished long ago.

And the Whistlers tend this unprepossessing little bloom well - indeed, their stripped-down version makes sweet virtue of necessity. In Mary's dreams, she herself impersonates Charlie's new comrades on the battlefield, and Jennifer O'Connor manages this trick with surprising ease - arguably, she's stronger as the sergeant who befriends Charlie than she is as the rather plummily-accented Mary. As Charlie, newcomer Samson Kohanski doesn't bother with a Canadian accent (thank God), but concentrates on this idealized young man's gentle good nature, which he brings off convincingly. Director Meg Taintor keeps things sweet but simple, and so the incipient syrup in some of the scenes never congeals, and she's ably assisted by designer Emily Nichols, who merely dresses the space with appropriate props, and lighting designer Erik Fox, who pulls off several evocative moments with limited means.

Of course the resonance of Mary's Wedding owes as much to our current mood as well as to the play's author and producers. Once again, the country has realized that war is folly, and that the lives of innocent young people have been destroyed by it. It would be nice to pretend that Mary's Wedding is merely a period piece; except, alas, it obviously isn't.

Relatively speaking

Ah, the "two cultures." They seem to be alive and well, even if C.P. Snow's famous formulation of the rift between the sciences and the humanities has been revised almost as often as it has been cited. These days, I suppose, you could best describe the "two culture" divide as being between scientists who continue to insist that their research results in empirical "truth," or at least empirical validity across myriad cultures, and literary intellectuals, who insist that no, science is embedded in culture nonetheless, because - well, I'm not sure why; it does seem that science's validity across every frame of reference (it even works in France!) would silence these people. Indeed, if science were actually embedded in a single cultural frame, the vast international cross-pollination of scientific research that we observe every day would be impossible. But never mind! Have you read Thomas Kuhn? He explains it all for you.

Of course it's not really fair to lay the weight of that ongoing debate on a slight, charming show like Einstein's Dreams (left), now at the Central Square Theatre through December 14. Still, the show does seem to want to be seen in that context. It's being produced by an outfit called Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT, a joint effort between my alma mater and the Underground Railway Theater to "develop new plays about science to provide the general public with a better understanding of our increasingly scientific and technological world." Judging from its first effort, alas, it's so far fallen short of that goal: Einstein's Dreams communicates almost nothing coherent about Einstein, or the Special Theory of Relativity, or the paradoxical nature of space-time in general. Still, it's not a bad evening out - a sweet, light piece of postmodern story theatre that never reaches the scientific sophistication of your average Nova episode, but is diverting, and sometimes even touching, all the same.

The trouble with its larger ambitions, of course, is the same problem that has always dogged the "two cultures" debate: the scientific illiteracy of most humanists. True, many scientists, engineers, and techies in general can seem culturally, or at least socially, retarded; still, a lot of them have read Shakespeare, many more dabble in conceptual or technological art, and most are avid, and sometimes even superb, musicians. They're more than halfway over the "bridge" to the humanities. But try to think of an actor or painter or writer who could hold his or her own at a particle accelerator. You see the problem? The vast majority of our "intellectuals" can rattle on ad infinitum about the mind/body problem or Cartesian dualism, but ask them about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and you'll almost certainly get a blank stare. And you can forget about the actual meaning of the Special Theory of Relativity - tellingly, when an actor in Einstein's Dreams attempted to write down its famous Lorentz transformation, he got the equations wrong (he clearly learned them visually rather than mathematically, rather the way ABBA used to sing its English hits phonetically).

So it seems whenever the two cultures meet, scientists find themselves facing humanists who basically haven't learned even the rudiments of their language; rather obviously, if there's ever going to be a translation of scientific meaning into humanistic meaning, humanists are completely unequipped to do it. Instead, they compensate with a parallel universe of "discourse" - and Einstein's Dreams is, I'm afraid, actually a case in point, although it's clearly well-intentioned (and never irritating). Alan Lightman's original bestseller was a short, light variation on Italo Calvino: a series of metaphoric meditations on "time" that pretended to derive from Einstein's development of the Special Theory. It didn't, of course, not really; Lightman's conceits - a land where time ends, a land where time goes backwards, a land where times goes in circles, etc. - conjured a rarefied melancholy, but said nothing about the actual intellectual challenges posed by Einstein (who never dreams about Hendrik Lorentz or Henri Poincaré, who were actually on his mind; like all pop culture, Dreams insists that Einstein came to his conclusions in an intellectual vacuum rather than an ether). Instead, Lightman's musings were elaborations of common postmodern tropes, that, true enough, grew like dandelions once Einstein had broken the traditional understanding of time. But styled as an evocation of his subconscious during the development of the Special Theory, I'd say they actually obscure the real meaning of Einstein's achievement (if anything, they map a bit better to the dilemmas of quantum mechanics, an entirely different kettle of metaphysical fish).

Which isn't to say that Lightman's skits aren't often damn cute, and sometimes genuinely moving, and are ably acted (at right) by the versatile Debra Wise, Steven Barkhimer, and especially Robert Najarian, who turned Einstein into a graceful commedia acrobat without ever losing some sense of his quiet depth. Director/adaptor Wes Savick gave a good account of the book - he hung on to much of its text verbatim - while Evan Harlan provided an apt live musical soundtrack. And Wen-Ti Tsen's simple set - really just three moving panels - poetically evoked all manner of environments (even cosmic ones).

Best of all, however, Einstein's Dreams concludes with a short talkback with either Lightman himself or an MIT or Harvard professor (depending on the night). The evening I attended, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek took the stage, looking like he'd just stepped out of central casting, wisps of uncombed hair, tweedy jacket and all. Wilczek, of course, quickly demolished the intellectual pretensions of the play, but in about as gentle a way as one could imagine (while the actors stared into space with fixed, uncomprehending smiles). And the discussion which ensued was probably the most invigorating I can recall in a theatre in years; probably due to Wilczek's presence, the place was full of MIT students, and to put it bluntly, MIT has the highest ratio of brains to b.s. of any college in this benighted burg. For awhile we all breathed the clear, cold air of thoughtful conversation rather than "discourse" - I suppose for me it was something of a nostalgia trip (even though I, too, could no longer write down a Lorentz transform to save my life), but that doesn't mean I'm not grateful.

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.