Theater Review—

‘Travesties’ Is A Smart Comedy, Especially For Those Who Appreciate Puns

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — There’s an old comedy line that runs “If the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska had married Howard Hughes, and then divorced him to marry Henry Kissinger, she’d be Wanda Hughes Kissinger now.” Do you get the pun? Do you appreciate the unlikely juxtaposition of the three famous names? If so, you’re in a position to enjoy Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.

There were some people who walked out on the Long Wharf production after the first act. They were not there to participate in the standing ovation that the rest of the audience gave to this complex, challenging, intellectually intriguing and masterfully performed “memory play.”

The work features Sam Waterston as the real life figure Henry Carr, portrayed as a doddering old man in 1974, trying to recall the most exciting period of his life, back in 1916, when, as an exchanged prisoner-of-war, he lived in Zurich, working for the British Consulate.

Located in the northern part of politically neutral Switzerland, Zurich was a hotbed of refugees, spies, revolutionaries, artists and bohemians fleeing the ravages of war and looking for a safe haven in which to paint, write or philosophize. Included among this group were James Joyce, working on what would be recognized as his masterpiece, Ulysses, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, working to define his program for the seizure of power by the proletariat, and Tristan Tzara, a Franco-Romanian poet who was one of the co-founders of the nihilistic Dada movement.

“Memory believes before knowing remembers,” said William Faulkner, and in Henry’s addled recollections, he was closely involved with all three of these notables.

The conceit of the play – which is set alternately in Henry’s apartment and in the reference section of Zurich Public Library – is that the three spent their days working in the library (as Karl Marx did in the British Museum). And, as Henry tells it, Tzara was in love with Carr’s younger sister, Gwendolyn, who worked as Joyce’s copyist, while Carr became smitten with the revolutionary-minded librarian, Cecily, who was a disciple and translator for Lenin.

It is a historical fact that Carr was recruited by Joyce to play the role of Algernon Moncrief in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, for which Joyce acted as business manager, which led to acrimonious lawsuits between the two of them.

Everything else that happens is pure fiction.

More than that, it is a Stoppardian amalgam of puns, parody, philosophical discourse and sight gags that manage to draw simultaneously on the style of Joyce’s Ulysses and the plot and costumes of the Wilde play, as Henry assumes the identity of Tzara’s fictious brother “Jack” in order to win the attention of Cecily. The more familiar you are with these works, the better you will be able to get the jokes.

At the same time, the play uses the three figures to engage in heady debates on the relationship between art and politics: Lenin, the revolutionary, is a staunch believer in the need for art to reflect the social struggle, while Tzara, the nihilist, feels that art should be as meaningless as the society that is busy disqualifying its own humanity through the stupidity of war, and Joyce plays the Irish card, breaking into song and dance routines that insult the insufferable stuffiness of the middle class.

In the midst of this, Carr remains the rather foolish Everyman-typically English, Xenophobic and not really getting all the “art” stuff, but doing his duty as a consular employee to keep an eye on these suspiciously “bolshie” types.

The acting is phenomenal, particularly Don Stephenson as Joyce, Gregor Paslawsky as Lenin and Tom Hewitt as Tzara. In addition, Isabel Keating as Mrs Lenin, Cheryl Lynn Bowers as Gwendolyn, and Maggie Lacey as Cecily are all terrific.

Sam Waterston is impressive in his ability to morph from the shaky old narrator to a flirtatious young gallant, pursuing the pretty librarian.

I suspect, however, that the people who left early with dyspeptic expressions on their faces had bought their tickets because (like this reviewer) they are diehard followers of Law and Order, and they wanted to see Jack McCoy battling the low-lifes. If you can’t get beyond that, this is not the play for you.

However, if you are up for an intellectual adventure, studded with literary associations and  unexpected musical digressions, sight gags like a cream pie fight between the two young women, reminiscent of mud wrestling at a topless bar – and the cutest little train you’ll ever see, as Comrade and Mrs Lenin are smuggled back to Russia to join the revolution – you’ll be standing up and cheering at the end.

(Performances continue until June 5. Contact Long Wharf at 203-787-4282 or www.LongWharf.org.)