History calling The Violet Hour clocks in at Stoneham BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Violet Hour By Richard Greenberg. Directed by Weylin Symes. Set by Cristina Todesco. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Mark Lanks. Sound by Jeff Jones. With Neil A. Casey, Stacy Fischer, Nathaniel McIntyre, Carol Ann Parker, and Patrick Zeller. At Stoneham Theatre through November 14.

The Violet Hour is Back to the Future with brains. Like Tony winner Richard Greenberg’s earlier and more masterful Three Days of Rain, his latest play, which ran on Broadway last year (with Robert Sean Leonard) and is now in its area premiere at Stoneham Theatre, explores the disconnect between the past as history and the present before historic interpretation gets hold of it. The play is not a great one; its human story is melodramatic as well as archly draped on figures borrowed from a golden age of American arts. But it does have a great gimmick — a mysterious machine that shows up unordered in the office of a fledgling publisher on April Fool’s Day 1919 and spews pages from tomes of the future that would seem to foretell the fates of the characters (along with tipping them as to what will happen later in the 20th century). Set on the cusp of optimism that followed World War I, with the Lost Generation confident that the worst was behind it, The Violet Hour pits hope against fate and suggests that knowledge of the latter doesn’t necessarily kill off the former. Would we really act differently if we knew, or thought we knew, the consequences of our actions and how history would regard us?

Greenberg’s play begins in the high-above-the-street, not-yet-sorted-out New York office of a scion of the wealthy, John Pace Seavering, who, following Princeton and the Great War, is setting himself up as a publisher. Seavering and his fuming factotum, Gidger, are looking amid the mess for misplaced theater tickets. Gidger doesn’t see the point, since the drama his employer plans to attend that evening is "utterly predicable. . . . You know what’s going to happen from the second the maid enters with the bowl of roses." Prescience and its effect is a theme of the play, with its flying pages of revelatory dispatches from the future. But what the clever Greenberg, contemplating time and its distortions, produces is not predictable. Flawed, florid, and in part hard to buy, but devoid of telegraphing maids bearing roses.

Max Perkins stand-in Seavering has limited capital (until he comes into his inheritance) and must choose whether to launch his enterprise with a rambling first novel (it takes up several wooden crates) by his financially strapped Irish-American Princeton chum Denis McCleary, whose engagement to meat-packing heiress Rosamund Plinth hinges on his having "prospects," or the memoirs of an African-American chanteuse with whom the publisher is having an Oedipal affair. "Tawny nightingale" Jessie Brewster is inspired, right down to the initials, by Josephine Baker. Denny, with his bewitching but unstable inamorata, is the F. Scott Fitzgerald figure (though the girth of his tome suggests Perkins protégé Thomas Wolfe). Once Seavering and Gidger start browsing the massive missives from the future, the choice of what or even whether to publish gets more complicated and more urgent.

Greenberg is nothing if not literate, and one intriguing aspect of the play is the way in which it comments on the devolution of language from the educated prose of the characters into the slang and jargon to come. Remarks Seavering to Gidger of the appropriation of the term "gay" when it’s evidently no longer needed to connote lightheartedness: "It seems, by century’s end, the prevailing note is a sort of dark general frivolity for which almost everyone has contempt but that no one does anything to change." "But gaiety has nothing to do with frivolity!" ripostes the always agitated Gidger (who probably is gay). "Gaiety has the utmost existential seriousness!" Then he can’t figure out what on earth he meant by "existential." Gidger’s indignation peaks when he learns that, like most of us, he has no niche in history; in terms of the intellectual postulations of the future, he does not exist.

The Violet Hour takes its name, without acknowledgment, from T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" (which, after all, hasn’t been published when Denis names his disorganized novel for "that New York hour when the evening is about to reward you for the day"). At Stoneham, where the play unfolds on a raked, high-windowed set by Cristina Todesco, lighting designer Mark Lanks engineers Denis’s idea of the title moment for him and Rosamund as they perch on a sill rapturously contemplating suicide. There’s a lot of such purple in Greenberg’s script, and director Weylin Symes does little to ameliorate it. The performances are all competent and, for the most part, subtly mannered. But channeling mania to come, Stacy Fischer pushes Rosamund’s giddy self-dramatization toward artificiality. And as Gidger, an aptly fussy Neil A. Casey takes very seriously the "spiking" Greenberg ascribes to the character’s voice. I’d put his Gidger down in history as the first man likely to shave with his larynx.