Marin Shakespeare Shakes Up its Opening

In opening remarks to the audience before the opening of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, Robert S. Currier, Marin Shakespeare Company’s founder and Artistic Director, explained that this playwright’s work can be “intellectually challenging.” Stoppard’s style frolics with language, throws in bits of Shakespeare and sets up parodies. (Parody is one definition of “travesty.”) The Czech-born playwright also composes absurdist and existential story lines that don’t make sense and don’t resolve, so audiences might ask themselves, “Is Tom Stoppard an unfettered genius or a self-indulgent smartypants?” Robert Currier has made up his mind: “I totally love the guy.”

Travesties, which won a Tony Award in 1976, explores the unreliable memories of Henry Carr, a real-life British Consulate employee who was stationed in Zurich in 1917. At that time, the city also housed Vladimir Lenin and his wife, Nadya, James Joyce, who was working on Ulysses, and Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dada movement in poetry and art. Joyce and Carr did actually meet and cooperate in a Zurich production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, but ended up suing each other. The other connections are fiction.

And so Carr’s “senile reminiscence” of Lenin’s “full, blond hair,” Tzara’s gymnastic entrances into a room, and the food fight about art vs. patriotism are not entirely to be believed. Nor is the Wildean segment, complete with cucumber sandwiches.

But Tom Stoppard pulls the realism rug out from under an audience again and again. Carr’s opening reminiscences, for instance, run without interruption for thirty minutes, broken only by outbursts from the cuckoo clock. A scene with Joyce, Gwendolyn, and Tzara is spoken entirely in limericks. Another scene is shaped from some lines of Shakespeare’s, while a duet between the two women from Earnest is modeled on the old vaudeville song, Mr. Gallegher and Mr Shean.

Pulling this off requires and gets some first-rate talent. Henry Carr is onstage in almost every scene, both as an old and a young man, so William Elsman deserves a deep bow for taking this on and making it work. Stephen Klum in costume is a ringer for Lenin, and he’s consistently dependable with the accent. Darren Bridgett’s athletic gyrations show Tristan Tzara at his peculiar best. And when Sharon Huff, as Lenin’s wife, delivers the news (in Russian) that the Revolution has started, she counters her husband’s disbelief with “Da! Da! Da!” echoing Tzara’s repetitions of “Dadadadada.”

Cat Thompson and Alexandra Matthews as the Gwendolen and Cecily of Earnest juggle the Edwardian ladies’ roles of Travesties. And Julian Lopez-Morillas as Carr’s manservant, Bennett, delivers a moving account of the workers’ uprising in Russia. All of this takes place on a set comprised of wheeled staircase-bookcases that travel beneath a trio of clocks that will never tell time. (The ship in the background has no purpose and will appear in a later play.)

After almost three hours, the nature of art has been explored, political passions have been challenged, beauty has been acknowledged, and the question remains: is Stoppard a glittering innovator or an unconvicted plagiarist?

These will make good conversation on the drive home.

Travesties will play in repertory with Taming of the Shrew in the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University until August 15. Ticket prices run between $20 and $35, with discounts available for advance, seasonal and multiple purchases. For a complete schedule of performance times and dates, see www.marinshakespeare.org or call the box office, 499-4488.

The amphitheatre welcomes picnickers and advises evening playgoers to bring extra layers and jackets for after dark. Call the box office for special parking.