"zesty performance...you will be delighted"

August 7, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

If you are familiar with Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest you will delight in Tom Stoppard's Travesties now playing in an zesty performance at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. And you will be delighted even more if you have read James Joyce's Ulysses.

However, such knowledge is not necessary. It is enough to know that in Zurich in 1917 three men who were to influence our modern world in various ways were living and writing. Lenin was there busy in the library with his manifestos on communism; James Joyce was there writing what was to become the most famous novel of the 20th century, Ulysses; and so was Tristan Tzara whose smashing of poetry was to lead to various aspects of what we now call "modernism."

While all these literary undertakings were going on, Joyce decided to stage a production of The Importance of Being Earnest and persuaded a member of the English consulate in Zurich to play a role (not Earnest, but the "other one").

The production ended up in lawsuits over a pair of trousers and other matters. But it did include Wilde's two heroines, Cecily and Gwendolyn, so Stoppard has added them to the cast list and you will find them in the play assisting Lenin and Joyce with their literary labors.

No playwright but Stoppard would dare to toss so many unmixable characters into one play. Stoppard not only does, he succeeds in letting us not only be able to follow it and roar with laughter as we do, but also weaves through the uproarious plot important themes concerning art, revolution, patriotism, time, and irony.

And the production of this marvelous play, one of Stoppard's best, is being given a brilliant and creative staging in Williamstown, under Gregory Boyd's intuitive direction.

Even before the play opens, the brilliant curtain behind the apron sets a tone - an enormous spoof of William Morris wallpaper done in Oscar Wilde's "in your face" taste.

Briefly, this sets the stage for the three small library desks at which the three literary men of this play are introduced: Tristan Zara with his scissors mutilating a poem; Lenin being summoned back to their dreary rooms by his worrying wife who informs him there is a revolution in Petersburg, and Joyce myoptically pouring over a dusty volume of the Dublin Street Directory of 1904.

Cecily and Gwendolyn, borrowed from Wilde, and serving as assistants to Lenin and Joyce, have their moment of head-banging collision in which the identical folders of creativity get switched, and Joyce's notes on "Oxen of the Sun" will wind up with Lenin and vice-versa with Lenin's notes on revolution. This accomplished, the play can begin and does with Joyce, who had a lovely tenor voice, singing "Galway Bay" as he exits.

With stage now empty, Joyce's song can be heard being badly played on a piano down-left as the lights pick up Henry Carr. In this brief prelude we have now met seven of the play's eight characters and set the themes in motion.

Henry Carr, though no hero, is the hero in the sense that it is his story and is told in his way. He rises from the piano in his grungy old bathrobe, an old man reminiscing about the long-ago days when, as a minor official in the Zurich embassy, he rubbed shoulders with the great and harbored many grudges

His version is confused, out of order, self-interrupted, and hysterically funny. It is also an incredibly long monologue that not only clues the audience in on what will occur on the stage, but keeps them roaring at the absurdity of his fractured memories of 1917. David Garrison gives a bravura performance.

But for him this is only half of it. As the scenes unfold, as Young Carr he is constantly on stage. Half the lines in this play are his; he opens it, he closes it. And though he is no hero it is he who at the end sounds an important theme:

"I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might has well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing."

All of the characters in this play are dynamic, brilliantly cast and presented with wit and agility.

Stephen Spinella as James Joyce is debonair and pivotal. Near the end of the first act after a heated literary exchange with the fiery Tristan Tzra, he quietly faces the audience and tells us what Leopold Bloom (and Homer's Ulysses) meant to him. "It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it." A quiet and awing moment in the midst of the hilarity. His quiet exit drew applause.

But as Joyce he is, of course, much more. He sings, he dances, he writes limericks, he interrogates the outrageous Tzara in a question-and-answer parody of a chapter in Ulysses.

Tristan Tzara (Michael Stuhlbarg ) is a delightful character, played delightfully. He is agile, mercurial, and determined to smash literature as he had known it before WWI had smashed the world as he had known it. He gleefully cuts sonnets into words to be rearranged into fractured sense, and he cavorts about the stage with the ease of a monkey when he is not busy assuming a pose, proclaiming a Dada manifesto or chasing a woman.

The woman he chases is Gwendolyn (Lynn Collins). Borrowed intact (and then some) from Wilde's play, she is flamboyant and imperious. She may seem demure as a devotee of Joyce and she quite beautifully quotes a Shakespeare sonnet for Tzara. But when his passion erupts, she will tear off her clothes with an abandon that might have shocked even the unshockable Wilde.

Her scenes with Cecily (Kali Rocha) begin as pure Wilde, but while Wilde was content to let her taunt Gwendolyn with too many lumps of sugar in her tea, this Cecily turns the encounter into a custard-pie brawl. The women strip not only their manners but their clothes as well. (This scene seemed too over-the-top. One pie each in the face would have been quite enough although the audience seemed to delight in the over abundance.)

Cecily begins as a docile librarian working her way methodically through the stacks. (She is only up to G so has heard of Gilbert but not Sullivan.) She opens the play primly demanding our silence, but when aroused by the wooing of Carr, she closes the library and strips for a quick tumble behind the desk.

Lenin (Gregor Paslawsky) and his wife Nadya (Candy Buckley) are splendid as the passionate revolutionist and his worried wife. They see spies everywhere, jabber at each other in Russian, trust no one and are carried off to Russia in an amazing train. Both deliver revolutionary addresses with zeal and fiery dedication and Nadya's concern for her husband is touchingly played.

Herb Foster as the impeccable butler is pure Earnest in every scene. He even maintains his dignity with a pie in his face, and he must again and again restart a Wildean dialogue with the absent-minded Carr who recircles over events and even current moments with alacrity.

The two main settings, Henry Carr's apartment and the Zurich Public library, are as elegant and decadent as the described front curtain. Credit goes to Neil Patel and also to Judith Dolan for flamboyant costumes and to Rui Rita for lights, especially those that encircle Tzara at one key moment of tirade.

When Stoppard wrote the play, both the Russian Revolution and Joyce's art had endured and much of Tzara's smashing had affected 20th century literary structure.

In 2003, we still have Ulysses, we still have Stoppard's 1974 play - which in shape is modernist, as fractured as the poems Tzara cut up and reassembled. But which makes sense, as least as much sense as is possible in this 21st century world.

Critics now tell us that we are in a period of Post-Modernism (whatever they seem to feel that means). However, this play flaunts the modernism that was a-birthing in Zurich in 1917 and the zany goings-on on the stage in Williamstown embrace it.