Four intellectuals and no nudity, but good drama

JULIA TIERNAN/YH James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and V.I. Lenin share camaraderie, intellectual theories, and women in Zurich. Who have you been hanging out with lately?

It begins with a ludicrously simple premise: Tristan Tzara and James Joyce were having a conversation. And for the rest of the show, Tom Stoppard's Travesties combines juxtapositions with light-hearted musings on the unknown and absurdly unexpected relationships that might have
occurred in Zurich during the First World War. Tzara is suddenly compelled to recount a recent Dada performance: "It began: boom, boom, boom..." And so begins the Yale Dramat's first experimental production of the spring semester. As we sit in the darkness, the sounds of war become the quiet gentility of a library, with Tzara, Lenin, Joyce, and the sister to the British consul.

One of Stoppard's trademarks is his unapologetic intellectualism. His plays are delightfully accessible to a well-read Yale audience, bursting with ideas and allusions. Travesties is no exception. Any performance risks sacrificing the joy of highbrow humor to static acting. Fortunately, director Brian Mullin, DC '01, has mounted a production that elevates Travesties into a theater experience that is--dare we say it--art.

The influence of Dada in the play leaves Stoppard a little less cogent than usual, but Mullin does an excellent job of letting the ideas flow freely, with a Joycean stream of consciousness effect. Mullin's most striking accomplishment is the balance he achieves among the acting styles demanded by the play.

Travesties owes a great debt to Wilde's famous comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest. Mullin's cast plays heavily to the audience--an allusion to the formality of the Victorian theater. By switching between more stilted formalism and the realism contemporary audiences are accustomed to, Mullin surprises us with some genuinely tender moments.

When Gwendolyn (Eliz-abeth Prestel, SY '02) and Tzara (Ian Robertson, DC '01) are left alone in the first act, he writes her a Dadaist poem; she responds with the original Shakespearean sonnet that he has deconstructed for her. They both perform well, but halfway through the scene, we catch a glimpse of vulnerability behind the well-starched acting style. Thankfully, Mullin has made sure that these moments of pathos and connection emerge in a play which could easily
see its characters as no more than philosophical puppets.

At the center of the show is Michael Gottlieb's, TC '00, Henry Carr, a man who is less than a footnote in the biographies of the famous men that populate the play. He is often asked what they were like, and he obliges with stories about the next-door neighbors, who later happened to turn into the intellectual giants history remembers. With lengthy and demanding monologues, Gottlieb delivers an excellent performance with comic prowess. He savors the words Stoppard has given him with the same easy humor he uses to savor his cigar. Gottlieb and Mullin portray Carr as a genuinely likeable character in spite of his bourgeois quirks.

The entire cast assumes a number of accents convincingly, including Romanian, Russian, and Adam O'Byrne's, TC '01, exquisite Irish brogue. But their talents run deeper, investing their characters with real life. As James Joyce, O'Byrne injects his performance with a zest for life and defies the author's reputation as a misanthropic literary genius. George Cederquist, SM '01, as Bennett, Carr's manservant, is a perfectly polished butler who conceals the heart of a revolutionary. Prestel and Vanessa Wolf, BR '01, as Cecily, are at their best in the second act as they sing through their tea, although it's a shame that Prestel's voice is not as strong as Wolf's. Ehren Park, ES '00, is an inspired V.I. Lenin, particularly when listening to a Beethoven sonata with remarkable poignancy at the end.

Kyle Jarrow's, SM '01, music is particularly commendable--always appropriate and well-suited to the production. But the sets seem designed for another play: dull, dreary, and either washed out or too dark to match the actors' cheerful banter .

Carr says in the first act, "[Art] was never quite put in those terms, but it is a useful way of grasping what civilized ideals are all about." The events of the play are without factual basis, yet Stoppard succeeds in throwing historically unrelated figures together to make arguments for his theories on civilized ideals. There are a lot of questions posed to the audience, making it an excellent show to see before a long coffee date, as there will inevitably be a lot to talk about. To quote Carr again, "It may be nonsense, but at least it's clever nonsense." Ultimately, Travesties is a play of ideas and substance, an exercise in clever--and worthwhile--nonsense.

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