Acting Lesson

Tom Stoppard is a very verbal playwright, especially his early work, so the plays read well.  But they are a challenge to act.  Here's Benedict Cumberbatch doing about three minutes in Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.  He's renowned lately for his facility with lots of words (Sherlock being a major instance) but I think this three minutes demonstrates how to act all those words. He reveals their humor, but he also makes them the expression of the character's thoughts and feelings.  It's a very impressive three minutes, illuminating what makes Stoppard's words theatrical,  but especially it seems to me a clinic for actors, period.

The Classic Problem

Tom Stoppard, whose new play The Hard Problem is onstage at the National Theatre in London, made some waves by claiming in a public forum that he had to dumb down a scene because preview audiences weren't getting a literary allusion.

He noted as well that a reference in one of his earlier plays to Goneril was recognized with the appropriate laugh in its first production in 1974, but when the play was revived in 1990, about half the audience was clueless.

The allusion, by the way, is in Travesties, a play so intellectually energetic and hilarious that it is almost never done (and certainly never on the North Coast.)  Henry Carr, a minor British official in Zurich, is being offered a part in The Importance of Being Earnest by its producer, James Joyce.  He asks why Joyce could possibly believe he is qualified.  Carr's younger sister Gwendolen says she recommended him. "You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton."  It seems that knowing Goneril is one of the sisters in King Lear is less essential to the joke than simply knowing it is a woman's part, and that Eton is (or was) all male.  Though like many jokes the humor is in the sound of the specific words.

Coincidentally, the play's director Nicholas Hytner said something perhaps pertinent to this point in an exit interview as he left his position running the National Theatre.  While giving him full marks for staging new plays of social and political import, the interviewer (veteran Guardian critic Michael Billington) noted a decline in productions from the classical repertoire.  Hytner accepted this observation, and said "I think there's been a general retreat from the classic repertory" but added "I also believe things will change and that the classic rep will be rediscovered by a new generation of directors."

This may be true, though especially in the UK--in the US I'd guess that such revivals as the new New York production of Albee's A Delicate Balance owe their existence to actors with clout (usually from the movies) who want challenging roles in a time-tested play once in awhile.

 But this overall point that the classic rep is not being done extends beyond Britain, though perhaps for different reasons.  My guess is that universities are also doing fewer classic plays, even modern American classics, unless they happen to be musicals.  It seems true of HSU for instance.

So what? Here's what.  Classic plays aren't classic just because they're old.  They may challenge successive generations of actors and directors as well as audiences, but they are worth that exploration.  And they are embedded in our common culture, for more than (but also including) punch lines of new jokes.

Some of this is an unfortunate byproduct of a healthy change--plays from cultures not much represented on common stages before.  There are only so many production slots, at the National or anywhere.

But it seems some and possibly quite a lot of it is not only because theatre audiences have dumbed down, but so has theatre education, leaving young theatre artists unequipped for the hard problems of the classics.

And it's a situation that feeds on itself, as the Hytner and Stoppard observations taken together suggest.  With fewer productions, fewer theatre artists as well as audience members get to experience classic plays.  They may all then comfortably believe that splashy musicals, identity dramas and warmed-over sitcoms are all there is.  Until very soon they are right.

Meanwhile, Stoppard's The Hard Problem (which is about consciousness, not--as the playwright points out--erectile dysfunction) is meeting with mixed reviews, often pointing out that it's not as good as his earlier plays.  If you read the reviews online and follow the algorthimically generated links, you may soon run into a review that says exactly the same thing about The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's now "classic" trilogy.

Stoppard's Start

[This is an expanded version of my North Coast Journal review of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead at the College of the Redwoods, where it completes its run this weekend, April 1-3.]

Celebrated for his erudition and wit, British playwright Tom Stoppard never went to college. Admired for his stagecraft, his only experience in theatre was as a newspaper drama critic. His “overnight success,” Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, took years before an Oxford student group did it in 1966. It nearly failed, until rescued by praise in a newspaper column. Audiences, tipped off that it’s a comedy, came and laughed. Then Kenneth Tynan (another drama critic) got Laurence Olivier and the National Theatre interested, and Stoppard has been a major playwright ever since.

Stoppard’s m.o. is as a clever wordsmith, but it’s not just the vocabulary or even the ideas—it’s the rhythms.  They make his plays appealing to actors (for the movie version of R&G, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth kept exuberantly running scenes even after they’d been filmed) and especially appealing to read.  That’s fortunate, because Stoppard’s plays aren’t often available to see.

Above left--the original National Theatre production.
Above right, the New York premiere program. John Wood
played Guildenstern in New York, and he would become
the lead that Stoppard preferred for subsequent plays.

But there were new dimensions suggested by seeing the current College of the Redwoods production of R&G. As on the page, it’s still an “elsewhere in Elsinore” story while Hamlet is center stage. It’s still Samuel Beckett meets Beyond the Fringe (or perhaps Firesign Theatre—Stoppard was writing its prototype while in a traveling fellowship program with Firesign’s Peter Bergman.)

But on the stage it’s also Laurel and Hardy as scripted by Oscar Wilde. There’s the same fabled existential situation of two lost souls swept along in an indifferent world. But it occurred to me that there’s also a class aspect: they are powerless middle class gentlemen caught in the struggles of royals.

Not that this is necessarily the CR version’s viewpoint—it’s just a product of seeing live actors perform it. The mesmerizing words reveal structure and metaphor. These two characters are so gripped in the logic of fate, of formal tragedy, that time itself is disappearing, like an episode of Doctor Who (already a BBC hit in the 60s when Stoppard started writing for that TV network, around the time that R&G was first produced.)

In particular, the correspondences and refractions with the Players who entertain at Elsinore are more robust on stage than on the page. Rosencrantz and Gilderstern find themselves as trapped in their roles at court as actors in a play—which of course, they also are. They speculate that they could have refused the summons from the King, and they ruminate on decisions they could make, but in the end they are exactly like the Players—they have some latitude in what they play, but they are fated to be players at the beck and call of their patrons.

Except for some edited (or dropped) speeches, some funny physical business and the larger crowd scene for the ending eliminated, CR honors us with the whole play.  The physical comedy written into the play but not played is a real loss, though.  Stoppard’s theatricality is not just verbal: his early plays are full of physical humor. Sometimes he employs variations on tried and true gags (there's even a pants falling down scene in R&G) but often the visual and physical jokes are outrageous and completely integrated into the plot.

He added even more to R&G in the movie version, which he directed, including a running gag of Rosencrantz offhandedly inventing all kinds of things, including the Big Mac.  (The movie DVD, by the way, is well worth obtaining, especially for the extensive interviews with Stoppard, Roth, Oldman and Richard Dreyfuss, whose performance as the Player is terrific.) 

At CR, Daniel Lawrence provides a simple set and Kjeld Lyth directs a straightforward production. Lexus Landry as Rosencrantz and Charlie Heinberg as Guildenstern are a physical contrast, and they use this for character as well as comedy. Landry, like Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy) is a big person who moves delicately, and that’s on view in his many tip-toe strides to see and report what’s happening elsewhere in Elsinore.

The two keep up with the relentless dialogue for the most part, and make its humor and rhythms sing at certain moments—even in the third act, remarkably, for this play takes stamina to perform.

The other key character is Dmitry Tokarsky as The Player, who provides crucial connections. Tokarsky is a seasoned actor, so he communicates what’s needed from this character, though he didn’t look entirely comfortable on that stage. Aaron Thiele as Hamlet and Jesse Chavez as Polonius make the best of their fewer moments. Other roles are played by Jonathan LaValley, Levi Goldin, Morgan Johnson, Raylene Henderson, George Thorpe, Laurene Thorpe and Amanda Wood. Many of the supporting players are CR students in their first post-high school shows. Denise Ryles and Rosemary Smith provide the theatrical costumes.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead completes its run this weekend, April 1-3 in the College of the Redwoods Forum Theater.

Stoppard by now has an impressive body of work.  A rough count of his original plays still available for performance plus his adaptations that have supplanted the originals in performance comes to about 30.   Some of his 1970s plays require large casts and elaborate staging (one calls for a symphony orchestra onstage), and so are done rarely (though ACT in San Francisco did Travesties in 2006. See photo at right. They also did Stoppard's Rock & Roll in 2008.)

But beginning with The Real Thing in 1982,  even his full-lengths--which sometimes received elaborate staging in London or New York--were contained enough and with small enough casts that smaller theatres could do them.  But (except perhaps for The Real Thing), theatres seldom do.  Hereabouts, not even the Oregon Shakespeare Festival does them--one in 1997 (Rough Crossing, an adaptation--it was my first summer here and I was tremendously jealous of people I knew who could afford to go up to see it)  and another adaptation, On the Razzle in 2007, which I happily did see.  So I guess we can expect another in 2017?

I'm not aware of another North Coast production in the past decade.  Not even one of Stoppard's outrageously funny short plays.  The Real Inspector Hound, for example, is perfect for community or college theatre.  I saw it only once, a student production in western Pennsylvania, and I don't know why it isn't done more often. (This is from a production in the Boston area.)

Addendum for Stoppard Scholars

Another factor in Tom Stoppard success--or at least a big part of his reputation from the beginning--was that he gave good interview.  There are filmed or videoed examples on youtube, though most are recent, but the influential and substantive interviews were for print.  The University of Michigan Press collected about 40 of them from 1967 to 1993 (though some are quite short) in Tom Stoppard in Conversation.  This volume includes 3 interviews by Mel Gussow of the New York Times.  Gussow published a separate book,  Conversations with Tom Stoppard (Limelight Editions, 1995) that includes four more, plus Gussow's introductions and afterword.  Gussow was always the Times second string critic, and really prospered in that position.  Without the pressure of the Times lead reviews, he could pursue enthusiasms and delve in depth.  He put together similar volumes of conversations with Harold Pinter, and with (and about) Samuel Beckett.  I consider his career exemplary. (Apparently this book is out of print now--I see on Amazon it's alarmingly expensive.)

There's a good biography: Tom Stoppard, A Life by Ira Nadel (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.)  The biographical chat at the beginning of this piece is based largely on this book.

This North Coast Weekend

College of the Redwoods presents Tom Stoppard's first hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, about what's happening elsewhere in Elsinore during Hamlet, in the CR Forum Theater on March 24-26, March 31-April 2 at 8 pm, with Sunday matinees at 2 pm on March 27 and April 3. Info: 707-476-4558.

Elsewhere: Stoppard by the Bay

ACT in SF has opened their production
of Tom Stoppard's play, "Rock & Roll."
The Chronicle reviews it here.

First Principles: Storytelling

"Theatre is a pragmatic art form. It's a storytelling art form, and lives or dies by its storytelling."

Tom Stoppard

The Mad Cuckoo Clock: On the Razzle at OSF

 Playwright Tom Stoppard, who turned 70 on July 3, is having quite a year. After a triumphant run at Lincoln Center, his epic 9-hour trilogy, Coast of Utopia, won more Tony Awards than any drama in history. And his newest play, Rock ‘n Roll, is Broadway bound.

 He’s had other great years (it was his fourth Tony for Best Play) but in a recent interview Stoppard reiterated that as a playwright “you don’t succeed unless you’re writing something that will be revived.” In a 1994 interview Stoppard named his 1981 farce, On the Razzle as the play he most wanted done again. That the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of On the Razzle is one of their current season’s triumphs must add to this year’s satisfactions.

 Beginning with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late 60s, Stoppard’s string of witty and intelligently madcap plays for stage, television and radio made him an international phenomenon. By 1981, this former theatre reviewer for provincial publications was living in a fashionable London district, in a house older than the United States.

 But his plays were about to change: first with a new infusion of emotion and more recognizable characters (particularly women) in The Real Thing (1982), and then combining this with historical depth and delicately rendered explorations of meaning in the subsequent plays (Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, etc.) leading to his most recent.

 But before he let go of the frenzied verbal gymnastics and headlong comedy, Stoppard powered those energies into the basic plot and characters from the 19th century Austrian playwright Johann Nestoy, and went On the Razzle—that is, on a heedless spree, a wide-eyed adventure—at full throttle: Stoppard running Wilde.

Which is not to say that this play is just a bag of puns and pratfalls. The puns and double entendres are certainly there (“Unhand my foot, sir!” “I love your niece!” “My knees, sir?” etc.) but there is no more exacting form than farce. It is a deceptively simple mechanism—you wind it all up in the first act, and let it spin wildly to its conclusion in the second—but it’s not easy to do.

 In all his plays Stoppard explores revelations from structure, so he was well equipped to create a classic farce. The OSF production, as directed by Laird Williamson, understands this mechanism. Late in the play, a character complains of people running in and out of her house like a “cuckoo-clock gone mad.” This is the image the play begins with, as the actors take the stage with the jerky motions of cuckoo-clock figures in procession.

The image also fits the place and period: 19th century Austria, where a pompous provincial shopkeeper (played with a touch of W.C. Fields by Tony DeBruno) leaves his grocery store in the hands of two clerks while he goes to Vienna to propose marriage, but the clerks (Rex Young and Tasso Feldman) go to Vienna as well for a last youthful adventure.

 There are other complications involving a niece (Teri Watts) and her suitor (Shad Willigham), a comic servant (G. Valmont Thomas), the fiancée (Suzanne Irving) and her widow friend (Terri McMahon) and other characters. There are disguises, mistaken identities, role reversals, mis-communication and of course lots of coincidence in this good-hearted, fast-paced farce that relocates some of Nestoy’s satire (as in a brilliant speech about merchants) but basically provides one funny surprise after another.

 This is a sumptuous production, a delight to the eye and ear. I suppose my only slight disappointment was in not hearing an English cast perform it. Though Stoppard translates easily to American idiom, the rhythms of language are very English, as the very English title suggests.

 Here’s a tidbit of its history that illustrates that happy accidents are not just part of the story, but were part of creating the play: its first production was in technical rehearsal (which is very near the end) when a “flaming pudding” Stoppard wanted in a restaurant scene was nixed because of fire regulations. Since Stoppard involves himself in the process, he was there to suggest the alternative: a birthday cake with electrically lit candles. But then he had to decide whose birthday it was. This involved rewriting many scenes back, and added another layer of the comic cake in the restaurant pay-off.

 Last time I wrote about the roots of theatre in ancient festivals. As formal theatre became part of festivals with summer productions outdoors, some began to specialize: mostly in Shakespeare.

 Another summer theatre tradition began in the early 20th century, when people fled hot cities like New York for the cooler countryside, and indoor summer theatres like the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut were born (there’s a fascinating book about it from Yale Press called An American Theatre.)

 Many country theatres featured lighter entertainments, but others experimented with new plays and challenging productions, as Westport did and does, joined by newer theatres like the Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

 The two traditions merged in indoor Shakespeare festivals, like the one I used to attend in the Elsinore-like stone Stephen Foster Memorial theatre at the University of Pittsburgh, or in the most successful all-season venues like Stratford, Ontario and of course, Ashland, Oregon.

 There the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is now in full swing, with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage, As You Like It and August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean as well as Stoppard’s On the Razzle in the main Bowmer Theatre, to be joined by their Tartuffe later this month. Lisa Loomer’s Distracted has just opened at the New Theatre, where the musical Tracy’s Tiger continues.

 Here on the North Coast, there are two productions this weekend. Based partly on a story by Italian playwright Dario Fo and partially created as a thesis project last year at the Dell’Arte School, The Greatest Story Never Told is described as a farce involving the meeting of two tramps and the Christian Holy Family, as brokered by angels.

It’s up next at the Mad River Festival, July 12-14 in the Carlo Theatre. It’s the work of the Virginia-based Independently Creative troupe, composed of Dell’Arte alums. The production is supported by an alumni fund to commemorate a Dell ‘Arte classmate, Nancy Lafrenz, who died of cancer. “Her class raised a bunch of money,” Michael Fields explained, “and so did her parents. We’ve invited them to the opening, and the production is in her memory.”

 Also this weekend, Ferndale Rep opens Taking My Turn, a musical revue about and by seniors. It plays at the Rep on July 13 at 8 PM, and July 14 and 15 at 2 PM. Then it goes on the road later in the month to the Senior Resource Center in Eureka, and the Garberville Theatre.

This Week's Column

Going Stoppard

Extending this week's review of Tom Stoppard's play, On the Razzle, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, with more musings on Tom Stoppard--in particular, his comedy...

Tom Stoppard is known for the content of his plays--the historical and political themes, the erudite riffs on aspects of science, philosophy, literature. Especially in the first half of his career, up until The Real Thing in 1982, he consciously pursued the goal of combining "a play of ideas with farce." He did so in big productions (Jumpers at the National Theatre, Travesties for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and both on Broadway) and in small (Dirty Linen at the Inter-Action's Almost Free Theatre, After Magritte for the Ambience Lunch Hour Theatre Club, and Dogg's Troupe Hamlet, which was first performed on the Fun Art Bus.)

Stoppard has also always been known as an innovator in structuring plays, and making the structure and the narrative dependent on each other. (This continues throughout his career.) All of this made his work very attractive to me from the moment Stoppard became known for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late 60s, when I was in college. I felt an immediate connection--to the Samuel Beckett rhythms of that play, to the academic philosophy in Jumpers (I'd studied analytic philosophy some in college) but most pervasively, to the 60s influences we had in common.

There are many other sources of his comedy. His debt to Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic wordplay is overt in several plays, especially Travesties, the plot of which involves a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. He was also not above a slightly more sophisticated form of rude and sexual humor, including sight gags (especially for instance in Dirty Linen) that have a long lineage but are most recently familiar from Vaudeville. At times Stoppard seemed to just about provide for all four Marx Brothers in the same play. He often uses a familiar comic device from Vaudeville and the movies, of verbal misunderstandings that wind up sounding like double talk. (Groucho and Chico's set piece dialogues were often based on this.) That style was lingering from the entry of many Vaudeville (or British Music Hall) stars into television (via radio and movies, too.)

As for later influences, in some of Stoppard's lines I hear an echo of Steve Allen, who emerged in the 50s as the first host of The Tonight Show in the 50s,and was at the height of his zany comedy in his late 60s late night show. For instance, in On the Razzle: "I worked for a tailor once. I cooked his goose for him. Everything went well until I got confused and goosed his cook." Steve Allen (to a 1990s audience aboard the now stationary Queen Mary, which by the way Stoppard sailed on when it was active): "I'm limping because of an old football injury. I tripped on an old football."

But for other 60s influences, particularly British, I saw a lot of evidence that my guesses are pretty good in Ira Bruce Nadel's biography of Stoppard, including one amazing long shot. For the influences (or at least echoes) I heard in his humor were the ones I cherished, especially those that came through America from England in the 60s. Moreover, the connections were often active: these people knew each other, saw each other's work and even idolized each other.

In reference to Douglas (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Adams, I once traced a basic lineage back to Cambridge and Oxford in the 1950s, to Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, who burst on the American scene in the Kennedy 60s with their revolutionary revue on Broadway, Beyond the Fringe. This very English grouping of original comic skits had of course played in London earlier, and made them all stars.

There's also a particular influence on their comedy that flowed through to Monty Python and Douglas Adams of the Cambridge and Oxford ordinary language philosophers--Wittgenstein, Russell and in particular G.E. Moore, who was a towering figure at Cambridge for a half century. These and their disciplines dominated philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic for generations. We were studying it here in the 60s.

Their close analyses of language and logic was not only fodder for comedy (Beyond the Fringe has a gem satirizing Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore directly) but their attention to language revealed its comic potential in skewering all kinds of pretense. Though Stoppard did not attend university, he did spend time with students at Cambridge on an early production of Rosencrantz, and his feel for the Cambridge School of philosophy--the philosopher he satirized in Jumpers was named George Moore--may have partly come from this comedy lineage.

Stoppard's career intersected with the Beyond the Fringe quartet in a number of ways. One of his early journalism jobs writing about theatre in London was for a magazine co-owned by Peter Cook; as a playwright, Jonathan Miller was suggested to direct one of his plays, and to star in another. Alan Bennett was by then a fellow playwright whose work was said to be an influence on Stoppard's. They were all part of the same milieu, knowing many of the same people, and working with them in theatre and film.

But even before, the resemblance was palpable and remarked upon, as when a reviewer wrote that Stoppard's R& G Are Dead was the funniest parody of Shakespeare since a famous skit by Beyond the Fringe.

 There were others in the Oxbridge line who added to the new comedy atmosphere--David Frost and his remarkable That Was the Week That Was brought bracing, intelligent, witty and overt social and political satire to British (and later American) TV. ( It was a later Frost show, and one of the comedians on it named John Cleese, that inspired Douglas Adams to write in that comic vein. Cleese of course would become part of another Oxbridge-educated group, Monty Python.)

There was a more physical lineage of comedy in the late 50s and through the 60s, personified by Peter Sellers and fellow madcaps of the Goon Show. The physical and verbal wit were combined in, for example, the films of Richard Lester (including A Hard Day's Night, which gave the Beatles physical comedy and witty lines--and not just the already verbally witty John Lennon.)

 By the late 60s, such a combination was turning up in the most popular TV series in England, especially with children: Doctor Who. Douglas Adams wrote for a few of Tom Baker's best years as the fourth Doctor, and he brought John Cleese and Eleanor Bron (a fine stage actor who appeared in the Lester/Beatles' film Help! and the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy, Bedazzled) in for a funny cameo. Another example would be the cult 60s/70s film, The Ruling Class, which starred Peter O'Toole--a particular friend of Tom Stoppard.

This was the atmosphere that Stoppard was breathing in the London of the 60s particularly, and afterwards as well. I cherish that era and all these figures, but there is one more group I would add as being part and parcel of the kind of humor they represent. Including them I thought was a little bit of a stretch, since they aren't English but American. Yet their highly sophisticated verbal humor, its political and social application, all at a breakneck pace, became a countercultural if not cultural phenomenon in California on the radio in the 1960s, and then nationally in the early 70s with their series of LPs. They were (and are) called the Firesign Theatre.

There's a stylistic, perhaps a inspirational connection, just as the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield were inspired by the Beatles--and so, by the way, was Stoppard, who famously played pop songs when he wrote, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; Stoppard was also known for his resemblance to Mick Jagger, which he reputedly enhanced with his 60s wardrobe. Inspiration from popular music and music figures is another common connection to many of the 60s/70s comic influences. This again evolved into personal connections and working relationships: the Pythons parodied and worked with members of the Beatles, and Stoppard himself eventually became friends with Jagger.

But beyond this sort of "something in the air", there was one tiny revelation in Nadel's biography, which clearly he didn't realize might lead anywhere: Tom Stoppard wrote his first version of Rosencrantz in 1964 while he was in Berlin for five months as part of a Ford Foundation project that brought together a small group of young theatre writers from the UK and the US. They all lived together, and each wrote for a project to be staged in Berlin with German theatre artists. Stoppard's was this early Rosencrantz. The kicker is that one of the two Americans was Peter Bergman, who returned to the US to become a founder and one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, creating topical comedy full of wordplay and wildness on stage but especially in a series of LPs that fans across America literally memorized.

Nadel apparently had no idea what Firesign Theatre was, but the sympathy of its comedic style with Stoppard's is apparent, at least to me. And now there is this tantalizing biographical connection.

Quoth

"Theatre satisfies my capacity for safety and risk."

Tom Stoppard
(who turned 70 yesterday)

Elizabeth Fuller's Dream Houses

Dream Houses

Update: Elizabeth Fuller responds in the Comments at the end of this post.

In a recent interview, playwright Tom Stoppard reinterated a view on reviewing that he's held since his first interviews in the early 70s: that the job of reviewers is to express the effect the play had on them the night they saw it. (As a young writer, Stoppard was a theatre reviewer, a contemporary of Kenneth Tynan. This is an old English tradition. H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw first met after a play by Henry James they were each reviewing for different newspapers.)

It's a point of view I take seriously, and basically agree with, although with various amendments. (Okay, you can count up the "view"s now.) For example, the night I saw Dream House at the Arcata Playhouse, I had a kind of allergy attack, which distracted me, and colored my experience of the play. But it would be irresponsible to let it color it too much in writing about the play. And although I was interested in meeting Elizabeth Fuller and hearing the experience of other playgoers at the reception afterwards, I had to go straight home. What if I'd stayed? That would not have changed my experience of the performance, but might well have suggested different ways to approach it in writing.

Stoppard was also talking about the typical newspaper reviewing situation, in which you're writing a review right after the show for the next day's paper. I usually have a few days before my weekly deadline, and with a play like this one, time is useful in letting impressions settle and some idea of the pattern of the play emerge. But I find that even several days is not enough to do more than make tentative conclusions. So one does fall back on immediate impressions--but ones that have lasted a few days, and become the most prominent.

Yet the journalist in me wants to be more "accurate" than that. The review is above all a piece of writing in a newspaper, meant to be read for all the reasons other stories are read--because it's informative and entertaining in itself. But communicating to an audience that is at least partly composed of people who can see the play themselves is not the same thing as talking about your own impressions as if yours were the accurate ones, or even representative. All of this is partly why I insist I'm writing a theatre column, and not theatre reviews.

Now it's been nearly a week since I saw Dream House, and another way to organize my impressions has emerged. That is, I absorbed this "through-line" of the play but other impressions were more dominant: this through-line is the self as a collection of voices talking to the central "me," and their ultimate effect is to produce and impose shame.

Carl Jung and doubtless other psychologists and philosophers believed that each of us is many people. Probably James Hillman would say that's why early civilizations had so many gods. The voices in our heads also include important outside influences: everything from parents and partners to "society."

The conceit of the play is that it's come time for the "me" to create a home. Which we always want to be our "perfect" home: the dream house. But what is perfect? Not the self. But how we arrange our imperfections becomes our creativity, and our self. Accepting, honoring and celebrating that becomes the conclusion.

From the beginning, the play is also structured as literally a dream. The house is the self, perhaps with some reference to the "earth household" of the world, and also to the play itself--because that's what the stage is, in performance: a dream house.

The voices are represented as sisters, a very theatrical device that allows Elizabeth Fuller to create characters with separate voices and physicalities. The "me"--the one the other voices are talking to-- in the beginning is "Bozo," a nickname but also the "me" characterized as a clown. As stage business, I frankly found this annoying, but conceptually it sort of works. The clown's comedy is about awkwardness, though the pratfalls can be thrillingly graceful and daring. The central character is very awkward, anxious and uncertain. That, as well as other elements of her personality, invites shaming.

The idea of shame is brought home near the end, very powerfully, when she strips naked and presents a rapid-fire series of angry and contemptuous comments about her body, as if coming from all the other voices in her head. It's the least gratuitious nude scene I've ever seen. It was intriguing to me that throughout the play she used wigs and clothing to never allow herself to appear conventionally attractive. Then she was naked, with sagging belly (and being of roughly her age, this really made me wince.) But immediately afterwards, she put on a shift which left only her attractive legs naked, and took off the wig that revealed blond hair and, in sum, a quite attractive woman. At the time I found this another dislocation, and a puzzling one. But it does seem to follow the arc of the play. With self-acceptance, beauty.

That what screws us up in life is being "shamed," or made ashamed of who we are and what we do, is not exactly a new idea. Intellectually, I suppose I felt a bit cheated about that. But this is a play, not an idea. It's a performance, and that's its emotional power.

I suspect most of the audience responded primarily to the "sisters"--the portrayals of the Developer, the Plumber, the Dreamer, the Inspector, the Gambler, the Slut. Those were very skillfully done, and they are the meat and potatoes of the show. When I wrote my comments for my column, I was still bothered by what I felt were lost opportunities to make the various levels of "house" more vivid, and I was still feeling negative responses to some other structural elements and stage business. But without seeing it again, I can only be very tentative about that. Who knows, it could have been allergies.

I hope we will see Elizabeth Fuller back here again. Chances are we will. With her husband and theatrical partner Conrad Bishop, she operates out of Sebastopol as The Independent Eye. Her credits are amazing-- some 3,000 performances, 32 seasons of 73 shows, including 52 new plays. Together they've written some 60 produced plays. From Milwaukee to Chicago to Philadelphia to CA, with prestiguous visits to the Meccas of Louisville and New York, such commitment to theatre is awe-inspiring.

2007 Tonys Biggest Winner

Congratulations to playwright Tom Stoppard,
whose trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" dominated the
2007 drama Tony Awards, winning Best Play,
best direction, featured performances, and best
scenic, costume and lighting design.

The TV Stage

Tom Stoppard is the guest on Charlie Rose tonight (Wednesday). His latest play, Rock & Roll is about the revolution that ultimately led to his fellow playwright, Vaclev Havel, becoming president of the Czech Republic. Stoppard was himself exiled from Czechslovakia as a child. One of Stoppard's earlier plays--one of his "adaptations"--called On the Razzle--is being produced as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival season.

When not pre-empted, Charlie Rose is seen at 11 p. on KEET.