Travesties
is a play about the fallibility of memory, so it's appropriate that the play's details evaporate so rapidly in memory. What's left, in Court Theater's excellent production, is playwright Tom Stoppard's tender meditation on the importance of making art, or conducting politics, with all one's energy and goodwill-the importance, that is, of being earnest. But, like the play of the same name, Travesties' message is delivered in an atmosphere of buoyant confusion suggesting nothing so much as a circus. When you come home from the circus, you're hard-pressed to cite specific tricks or acts; you remember only your wonder. By the same token, Stoppard's playful commingling of James Joyce, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Oscar Wilde and Dada leaves a residue of nothing but delight.Stoppard imagines encounters-or, rather, collisions-in 1917 Zurich between Joyce, Lenin and pioneering Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who were in fact all there at the time, and between these three and a quartet of fictional characters: Henry Carr, a British consular official; Carr's manservant; Carr's sister Gwendolen; and her friend Cecily. The women's names echo those of the women in The Importance of Being Earnest, but the playwright doesn't stop there; he also has Carr play "not Earnest, but the other one" in an amateur production of the play, so fantasy intersects with reality on multiple levels. The play is told as a reminiscence by an elderly Carr (the superb Lance Stuart Baker, so sharp and crisp in boulevard comedy that he's hard to recognize as the low-energy louche Nick from Court's production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and the tricks his memory plays him occupy much of the play. Lines and scenes are repeated with slight variations, the way they are in memories reviewed too often. But Stoppard wants us to consider not only how we remember, but what is worth remembering. He articulates brilliantly the arguments of both sides in the culture wars of the early 20th Century, those who sought new forms of meaning through apparent meaninglessness (Joyce and the Dadaists) and those who insisted on traditional forms (Wilde and, shockingly, Lenin). In so doing he raises a series of questions: if art has no meaning, or speaks in a language foreign to us, why are we bothering to try to understand? Yet if art is simply decoration or entertainment, like the Importance of Being Earnest, why are we bothering even to listen?
The tension between enjoyment and understanding is simultaneously addressed in the play and embodied in it. If you know Oscar Wilde's play, Travesties' flirtations and concealed identities are all the funnier; but it's not necessary to know Earnest to appreciate what Stoppard is doing. Similarly, if you know Ulysses, the interplay between the meditative Carr and his down-to-earth wife will delight you with its perfect-pitch echoes of Leopold Bloom and Molly, but it's not necessary to have wrestled with Joyce before coming to dance with Stoppard. Here more than in any of his other plays, Stoppard succeeds in using his erudition rather than merely displaying it.
The only doldrums come early in the second act, when the focus is on Lenin and his efforts to return to Russia. This is not a political play (except insofar as cultural battles are politics by other means), and the single-mindedly political Lenin has little to contribute to the colloquoy about art and memory. In reality, of course, Lenin's rule involved the eradication of memory, in show trials with phony confessions and the erasure of Leon Trotsky; and perhaps this is Stoppard's point. But he never successfully connects the political movement Lenin represents to the artistic movements of Tzara (Sean Allan Krill,, in marvelous flamboyant form) and Joyce (made expansively, almost ludicrously, Irish in Jay Whittaker's interpretation). But Lenin leaves Zurich, Stoppard leaves Lenin, and the play recovers its momentum.
Charles Newell has pulled off a double triumph here: as director, he's created a swift, clear and funny production of a difficult play, while as artistic director he's chosen a season whose impact is cumulative. Court's previous production was-guess what?-The Importance of Being Earnest, starring-guess who?-Lance Stuart Baker. Once again, the earlier production isn't a prerequisite for the later, but each enhances the other.
Stoppard's title is the height of irony: in seeming to distort Joyce, Wilde, Lenin, Tzara and history itself, he has succeeded in representing it more truthfully than any factual account. So while the departures from fact may be dismissed as "travesties"-just as Dadaism, stream of consciousness writing, and the defiance of sexual repression were, in their day-they are in fact the highest honor one artist could pay to another. Newell and Court Theater, in turn, have paid Stoppard the highest honor of which they're capable: presenting his work with both the fluency and the intellectual rigor it deserves.