Travesties

Last night I saw the Tom Stoppard play Travesties at the theater at Green Lake and enjoyed it very much. I noticed it on their schedule in the fall, and when I learned Ann's neighbor Dennis Kleinsmith was playing Lenin, all the more reason to go.

A little on why I am a Tom Stoppard fan. In 1982 I had a very small part in On The Razzle at Arena Stage. I was already familiar with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead since it is one of my father's favorite plays. Then in 1986 Brazil finally made it to Washington DC and was immediately one of my favorite movies.

Travesties turned out to be a very entertaining play. It is set in 1917 Zurich and features James Joyce, V.I. Lenin, and Tristan Tzara (one of the founders of Dada) as main characters. Joyce was the business manager for an English-language theatre in Zurich which produced The Importance of Being Earnest at that time. Joyce sued and was countersued by one of the actors in that production, Henry Carr.

The elderly Carr is the unreliable narrator of Travesties and the central conceit of the play is that his memories are jumbled with the Wilde play. The female characters in Travesties are named Gwendolen and Cecily after the female characters in Earnest. Travesties also uses mistaken identities to drive its romantic plot.

The scenes between Joyce and Tzara are wonderful. Tzara is belligerently anti-aesthetic and anti-intellectual. Joyce jabs at him with great wit and disdain. Tzaza argues with both Joyce and Carr at length about the role of art in society. Tzara gets to grandstand and has some wonderful Dada moments; for example, he uses scissors to chop up Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") and then reconstruct it, which turns out bawdy. The play also has musical elements and overall I was somewhat reminded of Dennis Potter's work.