http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=37145
Tom Stoppard's dreamers, ideologues, and record freaks monopolize
D.C. stages this week.
By Bob Mondello
Posted: April 29, 2009
Rock 'N' Roll
By Tom Stoppard; Directed by Joy Zinoman
At Studio Theatre to May 31
Heroes
By Gerald Sibleyras; Translated by Tom Stoppard; Directed by John Vreeke
At Metrostage to May 24
Where Shakespeare in his dotage wrote about the end of thingsan
aging magician clinging to power in The Tempest, unwise monarchs
losing their fiefdoms in King Lear and A Winter's TaleTom Stoppard
has entered his 70s writing about rock 'n' roll.
This is, I should admit, a false dichotomy. Mature playwrights often
peer into the abyss, and while a preternaturally ripe Stoppard began
his career by having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ponder their own
mortality in 1966 and has spent the intervening decades cranking out
intellectual comedies with the energy of a schoolboy, he's no
exception. His Rock 'N' Roll, mounted smartly at Studio Theatre, is
as much about a political winding-downthe death of communism in
Eastern Europeas it is about the anarchic force of rock. And his
translation of the French comedy Heroes, ideally cast at Metrostage,
is about the second childhood of senescence. But the man's writing is
hardly on the wane.
These two plays are, at their core, about rebellion against forces of
conformity. In Heroes, three French army veterans plot a breakout
from their nursing home. In Rock 'N' Roll, a Czech-born Ph.D.
candidate and Velvet Underground fan is distraught after the
communist regime crushes 1968's "Prague Spring," while his mentor, a
Marxist prof safely ensconced in Britain, persists in believing in
the Soviet ideal.
The Czech-born playwright asks us to empathize with the rock-crazed
Cambridge grad student even as he gives the mentor the first (and
often the last) word in most of the play's arguments. Blithe, naive,
album-collecting Jan (Stafford Clark-Price) has time on his side,
while Max (Ted Van Griethysen), his curmudgeonly, if stubbornly
idealistic prof, must make do with principle.
"I speak as one who's kicked in the guts by nine-tenths of anything
you can tell me about Soviet Russia," he laments before Jan has time
to bring up Stalin's abuses. But Max stays loyal to the Party for the
other tenth: "because they made the revolution, and no one else."
Jan's loyalty is to a more modern communismthe one espoused briefly
in 1968 by Czech President Alexander Dubcek, who allowed both a
measure of democracy and what the Party regarded as "socially
negative music" by the likes of the Czech band Plastic People of the
Universebut Max has none of it. Dubcek is a "reform communist," he
snorts, "like a nun who gives blowjobs is a reform nun." You don't
win arguments with this guy.
Unless, that is, you're his wife. Classical-lit prof Eleanor (Lisa
Harrow) has lost a breast to cancer and is worried about losing her
husband to the coeds who come to her for instruction in Sappho.
Confronting Max over the lovemaking that's disappeared along with her
breast, she's implacable in the way of someone who knows this could
be her last chance to be heard.
"I am not my body," she keens. "My body is nothing without me. Who is
the me who is still in one piece?"
While her question leaves Max momentarily speechlessthe moment is
wrenching at Studioher loss will dim the fire in his eyes more than
he can imagine.
Jan, meanwhile, experiences an intriguingly parallel loss after
returning to Czechoslovakia from Cambridge. The whole world seems
ablaze with revolutionstreet barricades in Paris, campus riots in
the United Statesbut in Prague after the crackdown, Jan finds his
friends fearful, his own prospects dimmed, his record collection
cause for official alarm.
As Stoppard meshes these stories, bouncing around in time and
doubling characters (Harrow plays both sharp-witted Eleanor and her
scatterbrained grown daughter Esme, while Katie Henney plays the
young Esme in Act One and Esme's daughter Alice in Act Two), Joy
Zinoman's spare, in-the-round production keeps pace with sure-footed
grace as the script flits from Cambridge to Prague, from complaints
about the jackboot of Soviet oppression to the only slightly lighter
foot of capitalism.
Designer Russell Metheny shifts scenes by sliding furniture silently
into place on a floor lighted from below by Michael Giannitti, who
provides rock-concert and academic-dinner-party ambience as required.
Erik Trester throws projections on panels that look like album covers
to keep us in the moment as the years pass. And the performers
negotiate a script that blends Eastern European political history
with rock shoutouts and tales of the rise and fall of Pink Floyd
frontman Syd Barrett, whose story punctuates the evening with a sort
of drug-infused mythological frisson.
And as the dissidents and dissonance combine into a heady, trippy
theatrical brew, the theatrical basics are well taken care of by a
generally sharp cast. Oh, perhaps Clark-Price overdoes the
open-mouthed naif bit in turning Jan into a rock-happy Candide, but
the others are stylish and subtleparticularly Shakespeare Theater
veterans Van Griethuysen and Harrow, who bring a classical precision
to characters steeped in the classics.
Godot-awaiting Didi and Gogo had a tree, relief-awaiting Gustave,
Henri, and Phillippe have a terrace. Also a statue of a dog, but
little else in Gerald Sibleyras' Le Vent des Peupliers (The Wind in
the Poplars), retitled Heroes in Stoppard's translation.
The heroes of Heroesgrumpy, agoraphobic Gustave (Ralph Cosham),
sunny but changeable Henri (Michael Tolaydo) and narcoleptic
Phillippe (John Dow)are French military retirees who bridle at
spending their golden years in a retirement home managed by a
tyrannical 5-foot-tall nun. To hear them tell it, she's a cross
between the kaiser and Methusela, though as these three old codgers
barely seem to have one set of brain cells between them, they may not
be the most reliable narrators. Regardless, they're snippy enough
about one another that they scarcely need someone else to complain about.
Henri, for instance, need do no more than utter the evening's
seemingly benign first sentence, "I love the month of August," to
have Gustave rolling his eyes, muttering "I knew it couldn't last,"
and launching into a dissertation on the ills of every month in the
calendar. And while they're determined to defend their little terrace
against incursions by other rest-home residents ("with barbed wire,
sandbags, trenchesit'll be like old times") their concentration
never lasts long, since Phillippe keeps conking out when his brain
waves short out on the shrapnel in his head. "One day he'll leave us
in the middle of a sentence," says a mortality-obsessed Gustave.
"He'll go out on a comma."
Their antipathy for the diminutive nun eventually results in a joint
resolve to run away, but even united, they're working at
cross-purposes. Gustave wants to head for Indochina, Henri angles for
a picnic, and Phillippeever the diplomatsuggests they compromise by
visiting the poplars they can see swaying in the breeze on a distant hill.
When Phillippe's proposal carries the day, director John Vreeke
marshals a frenzy of planning worthy of the Allied assault on Omaha
Beach. Blankets and provisions must be acquired, routes mapped, and
knots knotted in the fire hose that someone decides should be used to
ford a river. Happily, cooler heads will prevail as they realize that
should they actually reach the top of the hill where the poplars sway
in the breeze, there'll be another valley on the other side, possibly
with another terrace, and another dog statue. Resistance, in short,
is futileat least in the battle against age, that great, existential
equalizer. Still, where there's a campaign, there are bound to be
heroes, and the ones at Metrostage are a hoot.
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