Farce of nature

The SFGT does Tom Stoppard right

by Bill Rodriguez

TRAVESTIES. By Tom Stoppard. Directed by Judith Swift. With Nigel Gore, Tony Estrella, Molly Lloyd, Chris Perrotti, Gwyn Anderson, Alyn Carlson-Webster, Michael Healey, and Jim O'Brien. At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through March 11.

Who says you can't have it all? Not playwright Tom Stoppard. Not only is Travesties knee-slap funny, it's also witty and clever and at heart a serious intellectual examination of the power art and political action have when they are at war with the status quo -- or each other. In the production at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, we non-combatants get to have a grand old time watching it all.

As the barbs and bon mots fly, we can end up with tennis match whiplash following the fast and furious action. Trenchant witticisms -- "War is capitalism with the gloves off" -- fly. Wordplay abounds. One scene of overlapping conversations is comprised of limericks. Director Judith Swift has shaped a marvelous cast into a whirlwind farce of nature -- human nature -- yet it's all at a comfortable pace, like a brisk stroll through a very polite street riot.

This isn't a memory play that Eugene O'Neill would recognize. This is the recollection, for a memoir, of a junior level English consular functionary, rather confused in his dotage, dredging up memories and imaginings of Great Men he knew when they weren't even so-so. A cuckoo clock sounds whenever he rewinds a memory and replays it in an alternate version. The time is 1917, the place Zurich, Switzerland. James Joyce actually was there working on the revolutionary Ulysses at the time -- always in some variation of mismatched suit jacket and trousers, in this account. Proto-Surrealist Tristan Tzara was making passionate demonstrations about the absurdity of any such art that grew out of decadent Western culture. Stoppard learned that Lenin was also in town at the time, so we get to see the mastermind of the Russian Revolution trumping them both, promoting action that makes the most avant-garde art look like rear-guard thumb-sucking.

Stoppard centers the action around one Henry Carr (Nigel Gore), a real person known to literary history as the man who sued James Joyce for the cost of a pair of trousers. Carr bought them for a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, for which Joyce (Michael Healey) was business manager and Carr played the sophisticated Algernon. The actual Carr was mustered out of WWI and given work at the British Embassy after spending five days languishing in a battlefield No-Man's Land. (The playwright gives him a trivial wound, to keep things light.) Stoppard also gives him droll flashes of pomposity -- he recalls Lenin as "enigmatic, magnetic, but not, I think, astigmatic." Gore makes his foppish self-regard a delight to follow, even through the challenge of an early monologue that must run on more than 10 minutes. Carr's uncomplaining butler is Bennett, played shakily opening night by a Jim O'Brien who hadn't yet found a focus for the Marxism-spouting manservant.

Tony Estrella is by turns blazing-eyed and charming as the Romanian artist Tzara, who was credited with giving the Dada movement its name. Great name ("My art belongs to Dada," etc.) and apt movement for the time, waving a fist at the notion that art should make any more sense than life does when Europe is engulfed in carnage. Tzara is smitten by Carr's sister Gwendolen (Gwyn Anderson), as Carr is taken with Cecily (Molly Lloyd), the librarian at the public library where much of the action takes place. This allows some of the proceedings to play variations on the Oscar Wilde classic (which Stoppard has called the perfect comedy), as Tristan is called Jack and Carr Tristan. Anderson and Lloyd are a formidable comical duo together and pretty funny apart, as the passions under their British primness get an occasional airing.

In the second act, we see more of Lenin, played with dour authority by Chris Perrotti. He also joins in Carr's entertaining memory slippage, credited with a variation on a line from Earnest: "To lose one revolution may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness." Vladimir Illyich is aided by wife Nadya (Alyn Carlson-Webster) as they do what they can to sneak back to St. Petersburg and the fomenting revolution. But Stoppard has them stick around long enough to offer insights on how dangerous art seems to the totalitarian mentality. (Plato would have banned poets from his Republic, after all.)

It's not every theater company that has the nerve to take on a Stoppard play. The likes of Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead have to be performed brilliantly or their luminous text will make a merely workmanlike staging look dull. Fortunately, we have Judith Swift and the bright bunch at SFGT to show us how it should be done.