On Stage

...Thus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead grew out of the body of Hamlet...

...a former flower child who, with her husband, went through every phase of protest and hope, only to find herself tired, alienated and desperate, her allegiances shattered, her heroes dead...

...Tzara and his friends are creating the first of the sensationalistic, violently anti-art art movements...

...Frequently it is only Wilde's sentence structure that is kept, with just a word or two left to ring an allusive bell...

...Since Tzara would cut printed texts into words, drop them into his hat, then pull them out in chance order to create Dadaist poems, not only does such an undertaking figure prominently in the play, there are also numerous zany references to Tzara's hat, and hats in general...

...Lenin is only part of a bigger, previously observed difficulty for Stoppard: his inability to write, after brilliant first acts, nearly so effective second ones...

...By sticking with monologues, Patrick sets back the theater by some 2,500 years—and even at the beginnings of Greek drama there was at least a Chorus to respond to the single speaker...

...Jumpers managed to bring in a great many things, but was chiefly a take-off on current philosophical speculations whose methods and language it mocked...

...Much of this last is redeemed by the superb acting of John Wood, who makes Carr irresistible without diminishing his testiness, insensitivity and other bourgeois virtues...

...The prolific off-off-Broadway playwright Robert Patrick has, by way of a detour through London, made it to Broadway with Kennedy's Children...

...Outside becalmed Switzerland, World War I is raging, and these three men, in the eye of the storm, are brewing up, mostly at the public library, storms of their own...

...what would interest us is the interaction of these characters, the sparks they could strike off one another, the light they could suddenly direct into themselves in the course of verbal and emotional interplay...

...About the only joke Stoppard and his adroit director, Peter Wood, permit themselves at Lenin's expense (and even that was not in the London production) is that when Lenin is planning to travel to Russia disguised, the box in his lap lights up with the word WIG spelled in large red letters...

...The wit is sometimes devastating, more often merely lively, and not infrequently sophomoric...

...Still...

...As Cecily the librarian and Bennett the butler, Beth Morris and John Bott continue to be as charming as they were in London...

...unfortunately, it isn't a play...

...No wonder most of the second act fails as comedy, or as anything else...

...To offset this, Clive Donner, the English director, has whipped a generally able cast into immoderate outbursts, unholy gyrations and questionable displacements across the stage that manage more often to lose sympathy for the characters than to gain it...

...No one seems to have put this crucial and often-raised question to the much-interviewed, dazzlingly articulate author, some of whose interviews read as wittily and well as his plays...

...Or he may have friends of that persuasion, widespread among younger English writers, and be unwilling to offend them...

...Present, too, is Henry Carr, a minor British consular official whom Joyce enlisted to play Algernon in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest by the English Players...

...But we know these lost heroes, this failed hero worship, all too well...

...These five speak in alternating monologues out into the audience —or to God—but never to one another, stopping only for a drink, a trip to the toilet, or the next person's monologue...

...or will write an entire scene involving Joyce in limericks, because Joyce enjoyed composing them...

...The Importance of Being Earnest figures variously in Travesties: its plot becomes, roughly speaking, the plot of the new play, with most of Stoppard's characters analogues of Wilde's, sometimes speaking Wilde's lines, usually with significant differences...

...Similarly, one of the bones of contention between Carr and Joyce was a pair of trousers Carr bought to wear as Algernon and was never reimbursed for, so trousers figure grotesquely in Travesties in various ways...

...a Vietnam veteran who, driven mad, killed his revered buddy over there, and is getting ready for more havoc back home...

...Stoppard may be especially attracted to such gamesmanship because he is uneasy with people as people, as his first produced play...

...a beautiful go-go girl who envied Marilyn Monroe and proposed to replace her, but found that the times no longer wanted sex goddesses, only plastic imitations and drag queens...

...Carl Toms' designs are proficient, Robert Orn-bo's lighting is atmospheric, and Peter Wood's staging rushes the play neatly past the slow spots...

...We are in Zurich in 1917, with Lenin, Tristan Tzara, the poet and founder of Dada, and James Joyce prowling about...

...Stoppard refuses to be irreverent about Lenin...

...Travesties has all the wit, ingenuity, theatricality, sophistication you could ask for...

...The nest for Stoppard's latest cuckoo's egg is Wilde's play in which Carr was a great success as Algernon...

...Yet a truly dramatic "game" can work as theater, provided it has a compelling enough purpose, sustains our interest, and leaves us with ideas and emotions worth nurturing...

...But Stoppard raises such questions as what would have happened if these lives had become interconnected...

...But, unlike the other characters, they are not, cannot be, fitted into the Wildean framework, nor are they kidded in any other fashion...

...To be sure, our playwrights have been moving away from people, dramatizing instead everything from private nightmares to word or body games, albeit seldom with lasting success...

...Such a relatively simple conceit, however, is not enough for Stoppard, who likes to hatch his plays inside some pre-existent framework, there to feed parasitically off the host-construct...

...though the Joyce-Carr meeting is real, none of the others ever took place...

...Joyce is writing his great, constructively revolutionary novel...

...He and his wife, Krupskaya, appear briefly in the first, and loom large in the second act...

...What if Carr's (invented) sister had been Joyce's copyist and Tzara's sweetheart, and she, the three men and Cecily, the (invented) Socialist librarian beloved by Henry, had all gotten into debates about art, politics and life...

...What they recount, besides more or less well conceived personal disasters, is a list of well-known public tragedies and debacles—sometimes also tragicomedies and farces...

...It is as if his plays were complex puzzles he set himself and then intricately worked out, rather than human situations rendered in terms of the people who embody them...

...Parts of it are well written...

...Regrettably, John Hurt, a Tzara with some dignity, has been replaced by Tim Curry, who is all pipsqueakery...

...later still, Carr was to be dubiously immortalized as an oaf in Ulysses...

...And in the eye of these ministorms sits Henry Carr, having more or less truck with all of them, but remaining bourgeois, British and out of it all—a teapot in a tempest...

...On the slightest pretext, Stoppard will as readily launch into a scene of Shakespearean pastiche...

...Stoppard may himself be a Marxist-Leninist, though this seems highly unlikely...

...Lenin is contributing ideologically to the Russian Revolution, then scheming how to get out of Switzerland and into Russia...

...Patrick has an especially good ear for the dying fall, the muttered anguish or strangulated irony, with which many of these monologues end...

...Endgame, though "game" is in its very title, though much of it is a kind of wordplay, and though its characters are hardly "human" in the conventional sense, offers us food for both feeling and thought...

...Could Carr have prevented Lenin's departure and so changed the course of history...

...The other newcomers are adequate...

...With fleeting exceptions, what we get in Travesties is only spirited gags in search of a purpose, for the play, finally, is about little or nothing...

...Later, Joyce and Carr were to sue and countersue each other about petty financial matters...

...Or he may think that the contrast between Lenin's political radicalism and extreme cultural-artistic conservatism is in itself funny enough...

...It is framed by an aged Henry Carr reminiscing, allowing Stoppard to play further games by means of the old man's spectacular, revisionist memory lapses, and by replaying the same scene successively in several ways, according to the vagaries of senile recollection...

...Why the sudden reverence...

...All this is only a fraction of what Stoppard's ebullient invention tosses into the play, never relaxing except when it comes to Lenin...

...Or that the stark presence of Lenin makes the other characters funnier by contrast...

...Whatever the theory, the practice proves deleterious...

...But even the discrepancies between fact and remembrance are not central to the action...

...and the many debates about the function and rights of the artist in society lead nowhere...

...The Real Inspector Hound battened on the Agatha Christie-like play-within-a-play it parodied...

...As Joyce, neither Tom Bell in London nor James Booth over here is good, or even Irish, enough...

...Enter a Free Man, suggested...

...He is simply much more of a clever, literate fellow than a true playwright, at least as of now...

...indeed, almost every word he and Krupskaya utter is taken from their writings and speeches...

...The play is, of course, pure fabrication...

...a homosexual off-off-Broadway actor who was shattered by the co-opting and disbanding of the dedicated, crazy, pure cafe-theater he worked for and believed in...

...Into a Lower-East-Side bar come five characters who have been variously wounded by the '60s: A woman office-worker who never quite got over the assassination of her adored JFK...