Rock 'n' Roll
New York, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre
The Farnsworth Invention
New York, Music Box Theatre
Is He Dead?
New York, Lyceum Theatre
Like his last play, The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'n’ Roll carves out a substantial chunk of history and imagines how it might have played out in dramatic terms. This play isn’t as ambitious as The Coast of Utopia, a nine-hour trilogy that placed the great 19th-century advances in Russian philosophy against the political turmoil of their time, but once again Stoppard’s project is certainly substantial.
Cross-cutting between Cambridge, England and Prague, Rock 'n' Roll dramatizes what turned out to be the final act in the history of European Communism, beginning just after the tanks rolled into Prague and stamped out the brief, golden era of “Communism with a human face” under Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, and ending a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (The play concludes with the Rolling Stones concert in Prague in 1990.) This time Stoppard’s characters aren’t actual historical figures, as in The Coast of Utopia; though frequently invoked in the dialogue, Havel, Husák, and the Czech anarchist rock group, the Plastic People of the Universe -- sent to prison in 1976 -- remain offstage voices. The main characters are Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Cambridge-educated Czech who returns home at the end of the Dubcek regime and whose devotion to humanistic principles lands him in jail and, for a time, renders him homeless and jobless; and Max (Brian Cox), a British political theorist and lifelong Communist whose loyalty has survived the Stalinist purges, the Cold War and now the Soviet Union’s military aggression in Czechoslovakia. The play is called Rock 'n' Roll because for Jan, rock music is the embodiment of the spirit of intellectual freedom he finds in England and clings to back home in Prague; his low point comes when he returns to his apartment after his first jail term and finds his prized record collection in pieces. (Stoppard may be deliberately echoing the famous moment in Clifford Odets’s great Depression play Awake and Sing! when the embittered Bessie Berger strides into the bedroom of her aging Marxist papa, Jacob, and smashes his beloved Caruso records, which represent his dreams of a better world.)
Though Stoppard is sympathetic to both characters, in formal terms Jan is the protagonist of the play and Max the antagonist; given the history against which the drama unfolds, a British academic who is still arguing on behalf of the Soviet Union (and even has links to the KGB) in 1968 -- and who has no special affinity for rock ‘n’ roll -- couldn’t play any other role. The juxtaposition of the two men is an ingenious idea, though. So is the use of rock music to counterpoint the political events of the Husák era; a summary of what Stoppard is up to in Rock 'n' Roll suggests The Unbearable Lightness of Being as the English TV and film writer Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective) might have reimagined it. The Coast of Utopia sounded marvelous, too. But the experience of sitting through these plays doesn’t come close to matching up with a description of what goes on in them, let alone to the critical praise that has been lavished on them. Stoppard’s intellectual imagination often seems to run ahead of his theatrical impulses; these are dramatically inert pieces of work, undigested gab that you eventually stop listening to.
It has sometimes been the case with Stoppard’s plays that the New York productions don’t do them justice. You may discover the complexities later when you sit down to read them, or in regional mountings that are less concerned with the elements that lend a Broadway straight show prestige: impressive, high-concept sets, pictorial staging, showy “theatrical” acting (i.e., acting that calls attention to its own technical finesse). Both Arcadia and The Invention of Love are more interesting plays than the New York productions revealed. But Rock 'n' Roll, like The Coast of Utopia, is just as dead on the page as it is in performance. And in fact, at least The Coast of Utopia remained breathtaking to look at when the brittle café chatter of its highly educated characters became paralyzing. The imported Royal Court Theatre production of Rock 'n' Roll is directed by Trevor Nunn, a modern master at staging, yet visually it’s cramped and monotonous, all of its action shoehorned in the triangular sections of Robert Jones’s spare, unattractive set. Even the most affecting moment in the play, Jan’s discovery that his records have been destroyed by KGB thugs as a symbol of their power and disdain, is undermined by the narrowness and angularity of the setting: It takes us too long to assimilate the information relayed by the stage picture.
The acting, except for that of the always reliable Cox, is flamboyant but shapeless. Sewell, normally a fine performer, tends to read all his speeches with the same stagy, overzealous buoyancy, while we’re invited to admire his proficiency at sounding Czech. (Nunn relies on a device, specified in Stoppard’s stage directions in the published script, to distinguish Czech from English: When the Czech characters are conversing among themselves, they speak in their normal British accents.) Sinead Cusack, whose portrayal of Naomi Watts’s mother was one of the few touches of authenticity in the David Cronenberg picture Eastern Promises, gives an ungrounded performance in the dual role of Max’s wife Eleanor, who’s dying of cancer (in Act I), and the grown-up version of their daughter Esme (in Act II). In the first act, she alternates high-energy, highly polished, essentially unrevealing line readings with emotional explosions that seem to come from nowhere, and the theatrical coup of having her play her own grown-up daughter in the second act is short-circuited by the fact that she’s transparently too old to carry it off.
Stoppard’s early plays were absurdist farces though his style, like Pinter’s, owed just as much to the tradition of English comedy of manners as to Beckett or Ionesco. It’s been years since he’s dipped into theater of the absurd -- the last time may have been his light-handed (and underrated) spy farce Hapgood -- but you can still recognize the form of high comedy in his plays.
What’s baffling is that the high-comic spirit seems to have deserted him. Every now and then in Rock ‘n' Roll (as in The Coast of Utopia) a character gets off a good joke, but the political-historical content has taken the air out of the high-flown talk; you keep having the sense you’re being lectured. Naturally, these are the Stoppard plays that reviewers are going gaga for, their seriousness of purpose evidently functioning as intellectual cachet. The play comes to a dead halt between scenes (and there are many scenes) while Brechtian intertitles, projected on a scrim, announce far more information (personnel, date and place of recording) of the pop music Nunn -- following Stoppard’s directive -- uses to comment on the action.
At one time the speed of a Stoppard play -- the unceasing, hilarious banter -- was the equivalent of a magician’s prestidigitation. Now everything about his plays, including these attenuated, rhythmless productions, proclaim the importance of what we’re watching. But the ideas in Rock 'n' Roll aren’t very engaging, and the ironies of the unfolding story line are obvious and unrevealing: When Jan returns to England near the end of the play and presents Max with his now-declassified KGB file, what each of the men tells the other about their interaction with the KGB is so relatively benign, the element of betrayal so minor, that the men hardly seem to need the moment of reconciliation Stoppard has written for them. Any episode in Philip Kaufman’s film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is infinitely more complex and moving as a depiction of the life of bohemians in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion.
*
For the first time since he created Sports Night in 1998, writer Aaron Sorkin doesn’t have a show on TV this season, but he’s certainly kept himself busy. Charlie Wilson’s War, his first-rate adaptation of the George Crile book about the Texas congressman who engineered the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, is in movie theaters, while his play The Farnsworth Invention performs every night on Broadway. Like Rock 'n' Roll, The Farnsworth Invention dramatizes a slice of history, though this story is smaller-scale and not political -- it’s about the invention of TV, a process that began in the 1920s and culminated during the Depression. One is tempted to say that, compared to the events Stoppard’s play concerns itself with, Sorkin has chosen a minor topic. But Sorkin takes a very sober attitude toward television. The trouble with his last series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a single-season drama about the inner workings of a live late-night weekly comedy show clearly based on Saturday Night Live, wasn’t so much that the fast-talking style -- Sorkin’s contemporary version of high comedy -- replicated the style he’d applied to The West Wing for five years; some of us had grown so fond of Sorkin’s trademark banter that we were happy to hear the sound again. The problem was that the tone of the two shows was the same: smart-ass cynicism that kept breaking away to reveal earnestness and didacticism. The characters on The West Wing were so beautifully drawn (and beautifully acted) that the social-problem-play side of the program wasn’t a turn-off, as it had been in Sorkin’s play, A Few Good Men; after all, The West Wing was set in the White House. But to those who us who aren’t Aaron Sorkin, late-night TV comedy isn’t weighty enough to merit the full-scale West Wing treatment.
The good news about The Farnsworth Invention is that it almost completely lacks the proselytizing for which Sorkin has a weakness. Almost. Late in the play, David Sarnoff (Hank Azaria), whose company, RCA, patents television for the National Broadcasting Corporation, caves in to economic pressure and opens the door to advertisers as prime shapers of programming -- even though earlier, when RCA sent the Dempsey-Charpentier fight out over the air waves and made radio history, Sarnoff objected strenuously to the ads that stood between avid listeners and the sports event they’d tuned in for. So the play stops for a few minutes while its other main character, the inventor Philo Farnsworth (Jimmi Simpson), underscores the irony that the tough-talking, unsentimental Sarnoff -- who had the chutzpah, as a ten-year-old Jewish boy in a Russian shtetl, to tell a Cossack to fuck himself before the Cossack burned down his family’s home -- couldn’t stand up to the TV money men and protect his vision of a national popular medium untainted by the commercial banalities of advertising.
Aside from this interjection, the play isn’t heavy-handed, though like other dramatic treatments of TV history (the movies Quiz Show and Good Night, and Good Luck), it’s firmly focused on a moral issue. In a San Francisco lab funded by banker Bill Crocker (James Sutorius), Farnsworth and a small team of scientists -- including his wife Pem (Alexandra Wilson), his sister Agnes (Margot White) and his brother-in-law Cliff Gardner (Kyle Fabel), a Cal Tech undergraduate (Spencer Moses), and a refrigeration engineer working next door (Steve Rosen) -- conduct the pioneering experiments that produce the earliest televised images, but they can’t make those images clear enough to be commercially viable. RCA’s Vladimir Zworykin (Bruce McKenzie) is working on the same invention but is stuck farther behind than Farnsworth, and the stock market crash has made the company’s need to push itself ahead of the competition imperative. So Sarnoff sends Zworykin to San Francisco, where, in the spirit of scientific collegiality, Farnsworth invites him to his lab. Zworkykin takes what he learns there back to New York, figures out how to clean up the quality of the image, and patents television as his own invention. Farnsworth and his friends claim they should get the patent, but a judge rules in RCA’s favor, and Farnsworth, already debilitated by the death of his young son, fades into depression, alcoholism, and obscurity.
Sorkin uses Sarnoff and Farnsworth as twin narrators; the idea this device implies is that there are two sides to this story. But that’s a red herring, because -- at least as far as Sorkin is concerned (and we have no reason to doubt his point of view) -- Farnsworth was the man who invented TV; look at the title of the play. Sarnoff offers a survivor’s explanation of why he acted as he did (“I burned down his house so he wouldn’t burn down my house first”). But it’s clear that we’re meant to think that, through a combination of naiveté and insufficient legal resources to combat those of RCA -- not to mention the inadequate personal resources of a small-town (Rigby, Idaho, then Provo, Utah) lad, downed by domestic tragedy, to take on a two-fisted go-getter immigrant New Yorker like David Sarnoff -- Philo Farnsworth wound up being robbed blind. It’s clear that both Sorkin and the play’s director, Des McAnuff, admire Sarnoff; he has most of the best lines, and if you want the audience to hate a character you don’t ask a performer as appealing as Hank Azaria to play him. But Farnsworth has morality on his side. That’s not necessarily a good thing for Jimmi Simpson, the talented young actor who made a strong impression in last year’s movie Zodiac as Mike Mageau, one of the few survivors of an attack by the Zodiac killer. Simpson is charming in his early scenes as Farnsworth, especially his inebriated courtship of Pem. He’s less sure-footed in the later episodes when Philo starts to totter emotionally, and when Sorkin puts self-righteous speeches in his mouth, his readings become stentorian and monochromatic. (It doesn’t help that he sounds so much like Christian Slater.)
Its serious-mindedness aside, though, The Farnsworth Invention is really a piece of entertainment. McAnuff’s large, busy production, which features a skillful cast of nineteen, all except Azaria and Simpson in multiple roles, is lively and quick-witted, and it contains some deeply satisfying scientific-adventure sequences. In one, fourteen-year-old Philo (Christian M. Johansen), whose family has just moved to a small Idaho town and enrolled him in the local high school, presents his new science teacher (Jim Ortlieb) with a drawing that challenges the teacher's college-acquired knowledge of physics. (The teacher, Justin Tolman, shows up at the patents-court hearing as a witness for Farnsworth’s team, armed with the 1921 drawing he has kept all these years; it rough-sketches the basic principles of television.) In the best scene in the play, Farnsworth and his collaborators stage a demonstration of their invention for Crocker and their other investors, the administrators of a Utah Community Chest fund (McKenzie and Michael Mulheren) that provides his initial backing. At the eleventh hour, Gardner has designed a cathode tube (that’s the step that still eludes Zworykin), but just before the demo begins, the nervous refrigeration engineer, Harlan, bumps into the equipment. What everyone sees on the screen looks like smoke rather than a replication of the model set up in the next room, and the team is about to throw up their hands. Then Farnsworth realizes that in his clumsiness Harlan moved the equipment and that the smoke is a true replication issuing from the cigarette Pem left smoldering in an ashtray. The Farnsworth Invention, which ends with the televising of the first moon landing, captures the excitement of scientific pioneering. It should spark the junior-high science nerd in all of us.
*
Is He Dead?, the newly discovered 1898 Mark Twain comedy receiving its first professional production, isn’t a historical drama; it tells a purely made-up story that happens to be built around a famous French painter, Jean-François Millet. The play bears some resemblance to Travesties, the fiction Tom Stoppard fashioned around the coincidence that Lenin, Joyce, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara were living in Zurich at the same time, but it’s far less complicated and erudite, and Millet is the only character Twain doesn’t invent. Is He Dead? is a lightly satirical farce with a clever premise that begins with a familiar 19th-century melodrama trope. The as-yet-unknown Millet and his prospective father-in-law, Papa Leroux, are on the verge of bankruptcy; Bastien André, the villain to whom they both owe money, threatens to send them to prison unless he himself gets to marry Leroux’s daughter Marie. Millet’s friends, desperate to save him, launch an advertising campaign to draw prospective customers to his studio, and a wealthy visitor to Paris is intrigued enough to purchase some of his canvases. But then he finds out that Millet is still alive and withdraws his offer, insisting that art has no value unless its creator is dead. So Millet hatches a plan to fake his own death, then watch over his legacy in the guise of a widowed sister.
The play is most successful in the set-up and dénouement phases. The drag farce that occupies most of its running time isn’t up to, say, Charley’s Aunt, though Michael Blakemore has given it a sumptuous production with a seasoned cast. Your response to it will probably depend on how much you appreciate Norbert Leo Butz’s performance as Millet. Butz is a gifted, charismatic musical-comedy performer (Thou Shalt Not, Wicked, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), and his broad, winking-at-the-audience style here is clearly meant to evoke old-school vaudevillians who could reduce audiences to helpless giggles with a single take, like Ed Wynn or Bert Lahr.
It didn’t work for me; I found Butz’s mugging wearisome, though during the drag scenes people were falling about all around me. I much preferred the more precise clowning of the supporting cast, especially John McMartin as Papa Leroux, stretching his hangdog face and reading his lines like ulcerated whines; Byron Jennings (that treasure of the New York acting community, who never disappoints) as André; and David Pittu (Bertolt Brecht in last season’s Lovemusik) in four small roles, including the would-be customer whose reticence prompts Millet’s scam.
In one second-act scene, Pittu shows up as the King of France to view Millet’s alleged remains, since the artist’s much-publicized wasting away has suddenly made him a celebrity and a national treasure. He arrives with the Emperor of Russia and the Sultan of Turkey in tow, and it takes the audience a few seconds to register that these attendant royals are being impersonated, in the funniest and most elaborate of Martin Pakledinaz’s costume designs, by Patricia Conolly and Marylouise Burke, whose delightful performances as Millet’s devoted landladies, Madame Bathilde and Madame Caron, we have been enjoying since the opening scene. Nothing in Butz’s shtick made me laugh half as much as this inspired visual gag.