Into the woods with Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard in thermodynamic repose.

I do love Arcadia; I've loved it ever since I read it, before I'd ever seen it.  To me, it's Tom Stoppard's best play - and certainly one of the classics of the twentieth century - even if it's not his most original, and even if I'm not really prepared to defend its achievement against such possible rivals as Travesties or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

The "trouble" with Arcadia, of course, is that it's so synthetic, and its organizing structure so brazenly borrowed from A.S. Byatt's Possession (almost as compensation, you sometimes think, the playwright offers a Stoppard-like antagonist to a Byatt-like scholar right in the middle of the script), while many of its debates, as Boston Lowbrow's Bryce Lambert points out, are stolen from James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science.  But even if by borrowed means, Stoppard conjures in Arcadia an elaborate entertainment (indeed, an old-fashioned play of ideas) that perfectly balances his frisky wit with a mournful awareness of life's terrible vicissitudes - as well as breezy discussions of not only poetry, landscape architecture, and the Romantic period, but also chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (with Fermat's Last Theorem thrown in as a kind of aperitif).

Stoppard's conceit is that even as we watch a set of academic sleuths in the present day dig about in an English country house for clues about Lord Byron (who once visited), we can simultaneously watch, through some sort of time warp, the historical record of that fateful weekend back in 1809.  Today's intellectuals rattle on about sex and the romantic imagination; little do they know that their counterparts two centuries ago were consumed instead with thoughts of sex and science - largely because a precocious mathematical prodigy was on the premises, in the person of young Thomasina Coverly (note the similarity of that first name to Stoppard's own, Tomáš - yes, his ego et in Arcadia). She was the real "genius" of the house, not Byron, although her achievements, like her short life, were lost; our real history is always a secret, Stoppard whispers to us (thus Thomasina's descendant in the present day won't speak at all) - even as he braids together C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities more intimately than perhaps any one else has ever managed; indeed, the playwright's final images are of the two ages (and cultures) dancing around each other in a haunting, entwined enchantment.

All this, of course, makes Arcadia quite a challenge - it requires a large, poised and articulate cast that can bring off serious debate and romantic feeling as well as high comedy (and a director who knows how to keep that delicate balance).  So it felt like a stretch for a fringe company - still, I had heard good things about the Bad Habit version (which closed, alas, last weekend - this is a post-mortem, but then that's kind of appropriate for Arcadia).  And I've often been surprised at what the fringe can do - indeed, every season a fringe show ranks in my top 10 for the year.

Greg Nussen and David Lutheran make their way through the thickets of Arcadia.

So I wasn't shocked to discover that this Arcadia was, indeed, a solid effort - wittily directed and mostly well-acted, with one or two stand-out performances.  To be honest, it was helped immensely, in my view, by being apparently acted by smart, quirky people who understood what it was about, rather than by a crowd of Equity actors attempting to simulate a professorial intelligence they didn't really have.  Alas, a few mis-castings, and one or two failures in acting energy (there was little sexual heat in this version) kept it, I think, from greatness.  Still, director Daniel Morris and his cast did well by Stoppard's ideas - and there are a lot of those in Arcadia; as should be the case with this particular play, you could feel the audience paying close attention to everything that transpired, eager to catch every multi-layered quip and witty aside (a sight not often seen at our larger stages, I'm telling you).  And I felt that the decision to produce the script on the stage of the Wimberley Theatre, in the round, proved inspired; I'd always thought of Arcadia as a proscenium show, but something about the arena staging, with its matrix of exits and entrances, resonated with the play's themes; the only thing lacking, alas (and you rarely get this anyway), was the backdrop of romantically ruined grounds that are meant to be seen outside the windows of "Sidley Park" - and which become freighted with more and more tragic meaning as the play progresses.

But this reminds me, I'm afraid, of the one great failure in Morris's otherwise astute direction - the play's final tragedy, which Stoppard never states directly (and which I can't give away without ruining the sad magic of its discovery) - didn't really coalesce in the audience's mind, I don't think, as the curtain fell (although perhaps it did after later discussion). That gap, however, was connected intimately to the production's other great gap - in the pivotal role of Thomasina's besotted tutor, Septimus Hodge, young Greg Nussen proved woefully inadequate.  Mr. Nussen is very nice to look at - and his voice is a pleasing purr; but his blandness was a constant reminder that, as they say, beauty isn't everything.  And his performance was a particular problem because Septimus Hodge is supposed to have the passionately beating, ultimately broken heart at the center of the script!

Luckily, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing - even when they weren't quite right for their respective roles - so generally the play moved forward without him. John Geoffrion, for instance (a frequent commenter on this blog, btw), brought a welcome spark to Bernard Nightingale, the egotistical, Stoppard-like Byron expert who stomps all over the work of the Byatt-like Hannah Jarvis.  Geoffrion was one of those slight miscastings in the show that worked pretty well anyway - he played Nightingale as more of a twit than a dick, and so the sexual tension between him and Jarvis went missing - but he threw himself with such eager fire into his rants on art and science that you didn't really mind.  Meanwhile, as Jarvis, Sarah Bedard didn't seem to mind the lack of tension either; Bedard is a beauty, and projected the right kind of skeptical intelligence as Jarvis, but she was always too calm for me to really believe in her slow burn - nor did I quite see her put together the script's great mystery in her head (Nightingale's thesis on Byron is an ego-driven fantasy, but Jarvis steadily works her way toward something like the truth).

Still, Bedard managed many a witty turn of phrase, and there were similarly nice turns from many in the cast.  As the smartly sluttish Lady Croom, for instance, A. Nora Long didn't convince me as a sexual raptor, but her drily rendered sarcasm was always delightful; meanwhile, Nick Chris was utterly believable as Stoppard's brilliant exponent of chaos, but didn't always have the sensitive vulnerability that surfaces now and then in the part (and which afflicts his entire eccentric family).  There were more consistently satisfying comic turns from David Lutheran, as an idiotically pompous cuckold, and especially Glen Moore, as his blowhard companion.  Meanwhile Luke Murtha was always sweetly intriguing as that silent brother.  But at the center of the production was a really spectacular turn by newcomer Alycia Sacco as the sparkling Thomasina - easily the best performance of this role I've seen out of four professional productions.  Whenever Sacco giggled, or waltzed to Chopin, or uncertainly offered a brilliant solution to an unsolved theorem, the show all but belonged to her, and you felt art and science dancing together (for a brief moment) just as Stoppard meant them to.

Christopher Durang Parodies It All for You

Heather Peterson and Mack Carroll in Nina in the Morning.

Bad Habit Productions keeps kind of just missing its big break. It's one of the stalwarts of the fringe (the Cambridge fringe, which centers on the YMCA in Central Square) and regularly delivers smart, snappy productions - just not consistently enough to hang onto the public's attention span.  And when it does have a breakout production, usually with a zippy farce like last year's Ideal Husband, its big idea tends to get "borrowed" by other theatres.  Add to that the fact that press coverage is drying up in this town for everything but full-equity shows, and it's no wonder the company's latest, Durang Durang (which I think closes tomorrow) has garnered little or no press attention.

Which is too bad, because it features several strong performances from folks who toil on the cusp between Boston's community and semi-pro scenes, and who are looking for their "big break," too.  The evening itself - a collection of parodies and one-acts by dark, ditzy farceur Christopher Durang - is a bit hiss-or-miss (the parodies are generally stronger than the farces, but everything has a tendency to go on a bit too long), but at its best it's wicked funny, just as it should be, particularly to theatre types who can appreciate the playwright's precise puncturings of the likes of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard.

As a playwright, Durang is a curious case - his influence has actually been huge, even though he has probably never written a great play, and only one or two really good ones (Beyond Therapy, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You).  His central emotional trope - commingled horror of/attraction to the cruel pleasures of nihilistic freedom - has certainly proved durable. But the trouble with Durang is that he suffers from a kind of dramatic attention deficit disorder - he can't sustain a story or even a scene for very long; addicted to the "freedom" that terrifies him, he has to constantly dodge in and out of various meta-theatrical modes that are, admittedly, funny, but also destroy any larger ambition he might have for his work.  Still, his attendant, vaguely-collegiate attitude - that of a smart-aleck, all-knowing auditor of what's happening on stage - has pervaded pop culture; watch any Simpsons episode, and you're bound to feel his influence, and Ryan Landry's whole schtick is merely a variant of his M.O.

And if you're interested in his history, Durang Durang operates as a solid introduction to the playwright, for good and ill, as it showcases both his strengths and weaknesses in about equal measure.   The most famous of the parodies (some of which I vaguely remember seeing years ago at the ART) is the gender-bent Glass Menagerie send-up For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, but the best is probably A Stye of the Eye, which isn't so much a parody as a satire - actually, a brutal putdown - of the intellectual pretensions of Sam Shepard (particularly his dopey A Lie of the Mind).  Here Shelley Brown, Jenny Gutbezahl, Julie Jarvis, and Mike Budwey all had a field day, and the trenchant one-liners came thick and fast; I think my favorite moment came when wizened old "Ma" opined that her two warring sons "Seem like opposite sides of the same personality . . . ta think I gave birth ta two symbols, and me without a college education!!"  Yup, that's Sam Shepard in a nutshell.

The trouble is that when Durang, the brilliant parodist, tries to spread his own dramatic wings, he can't get off the ground - or he falls victim to the same superficial tendencies he so expertly lampoons in others.  Nina in the Morning, for instance, resembles what a Sam Shepard one-act would look like if Shepard had been born gay in Beverly Hills.  And Wanda's Visit is really just an extended sitcom episode.  Meanwhile Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room features some viciously accurate satire of the Hollywood scene, but centers around a playwright who can't write a real play (and who ends up folding laundry onstage).

So what happened to Christopher Durang?  How did he start at the Yale Rep, connected to everybody and everyone, with a smart sensibility to boot - yet end up folding laundry and writing TV pilots?  I don't know, and Durang Durang doesn't tell us.  But as we ponder the playwright's disappointing career, at least we can enjoy his waspish critical wit, as well as a few more sharp performances at Bad Habit: Heather Peterson knocked both Nina and Tea Room out of the park, and there were more nice turns from Julie Jarvis, Sheryl Johns, Mack Carroll, and Joseph O'Connor.  With performances like these, it's only a matter of time before Bad Habit finds a larger place in the city's theatrical scene.

The Marquis de Sade's Bad Habit

It's in the nature of things that a young theatre's reach should sometimes exceed its grasp. In fact, that's the way things should be. But I'm afraid Quills, Doug Wright's dark fantasia on the - uh - "irrepressible" Marquis de Sade, proves more than a stretch for the up-and-coming Bad Habit Productions, one of the "Cambridge Fringe" companies working out of the YMCA in Central Square.

The production does boast a charismatic lead performance from Timothy Otte as the gleefully perverted Marquis. But Quills requires much more than a single star turn - ghoulish as it is, it's essentially a black farce in slow motion that demands a high sense of style in both performance and design. And while there are glimmers of talent here and there in the generally fresh-faced cast, there's very little of what you might call mature control (one actor attempts a French accent, for example, while everyone else sounds American - except for one other newcomer, who goes slightly British now and then). Meanwhile the set is half-baked, and the costumes kind of inexplicable (they seem to float between multiple periods). The whole thing feels like a well-intentioned college production - appropriate to friends and family only, I'd say; but to any one else, it might seem positively sadistic.

In case you're unfamiliar with the play, it's a history piece that plays so fast and loose with history that it's essentially fantasy. It's well known that the Marquis spent his last years in the asylum of Charenton; Wright's conceit is that the hospital's administration set about trying to silence de Sade through any means possible - including eventual dismemberment. Of course nothing like this happened to the Marquis at all; perhaps the most horrifying thing about his whole career is that he died peacefully in his bed - and what's more, Wright's tormented torturer, the Abbe de Coulmier (Eric Hamel) was, in real life, one of de Sade's protectors, not punishers.

Oh, well, what are a few historical facts, I suppose, when you're bent on simplistic propaganda, as Wright is here. Having suffered through both Justine and Philosophy of the Bedroom in college, I have few illusions about the Marquis as an avatar of freedom; his sexual peccadilloes all depended on coercion or actual incarceration, and while modern types like to think of him as advocating something like today's voluntary S&M scene, he was actually more into sewing up vaginas that had been infected with syphilis and ejaculating over freshly murdered corpses. He wasn't so much an existentialist as an obsessive sociopath, and hardly a libertine but rather a slave to his own compulsions.

Wright's point, however, is that those who would control (or eradicate) the Marquis's savage impulses will inevitably become as monstrous as he. Fair enough; but does it really require over two and a half hours of stage time to make this rather obvious case? Apparently; but we tire of his slow, steady march toward the inevitable well before Quills reaches its climax (which does, I must admit, include a memorably creepy coup de théâtre). And it doesn't help that most of the cast has trouble declaiming the playwright's labored attempt at period speech.

There is, it's true, Otte's performance to enjoy; his high spirits buoy much of the play, and he seems utterly unfazed by his lengthy stretches of nude repartee. Even he, however, doesn't quite suggest the relentlessness of de Sade's obsessions - which might have helped Eric Hamel, who's thoughtful, but not much more, in the difficult role of the Abbe (a part I confess I've never seen come off). As the Marquis's "love" interest, Jenny Reagan also shows some potential, but I think should have a bit more avid energy. The rest of the cast struggles, in various modes and keys. Bad Habit had a recent success in their witty "drag" version of Wilde's An Ideal Husband (a production which will soon be reproduced up at Gloucester Stage); which may have led them to believe they were up for any kind of exercise in high style. But alas, where Wilde glitters, Wright lumbers, and as a result, this production of Quills sometimes feels like a kind of children's crusade.