"I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination . . . and I...

1. Remy Bumppo Theatre aces Tom Stoppard's test with
Travesties
"I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination . . . and I
flung at him--'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?'
Bloody nerve."
--Henry Carr in Travesties
Tom Stoppard is the Will Shortz of playwriting. Like the New York Times crossword puzzle editor,
Stoppard trades in the clever riddle, the esoteric reference, the trick question, and the sly joke
hidden among snappy clues. Like Shortz, too, Stoppard is a master. Since the mid-1960s his scripts
have toyed with subjects ranging from Hamlet (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) to 19th-
century Russian radicals (The Coast of Utopia), academia and the moon (Jumpers) to espionage and
motherhood (Hapgood), Lord Byron and mathematics (Arcadia) to love and the artist's life (The Real
Thing).
But Travesties may be the most Shortzian of Stoppard's plays. First performed in 1974, it's an orgy
of erudition, a cerebro-slapstick, dropping names and pastiching classics with the same abandon
that the Three Stooges applied to cracking heads. Picture some of the founders of the 20th-century
world engaged in nearly three hours of highly sophisticated why-I-oughtas.

2. And it's all based on fact. During World War I, neutral Switzerland was a magnet for Europe's better-
quality refugees: artists and intellectuals looking for a place to carry on their investigations while
the old order committed suicide. Vladimir Lenin was in Zurich during 1916 and '17, plotting
revolution. So was James Joyce, plotting Ulysses. The Romanian-born avant-gardist Tristan Tzara
was there too, carrying out Dada provocations at the Cabaret Voltaire, in collusion with folks like
Jean/Hans Arp and Hugo Ball.
Henry Carr? Also in Zurich, although not as a member of the international cutting edge. A wounded
veteran of the war, Carr had what Stoppard has called a "small job" at the British consulate. He
crossed paths with Joyce when the writer cast him as Algy Moncrieff in an amateur staging of Oscar
Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The role was a success for Carr but led to bad blood and
years of litigation between him and Joyce, when Joyce refused to pay for the clothes Carr bought for
his performance and Carr called Joyce some allegedly slanderous names in response.
Stoppard typically uses minor personalities as the lenses through which his plays view major doings,
the most famous example being poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who experience Hamlet's
tragedy in snatches of scenes and overheard dialogue, unaware that they exist for no reason other
than to move it to its next phase. Carr is the lens for Travesties. The action turns on his decidedly
faulty recollections as a semisenile old man.

3. But wait! There's more. Carr's account is framed, in turn, as a burlesque of The Importance of Being
Earnest, allowing for romantic mind games to go with the more abstract ones practiced by Tzara,
Joyce, and Lenin.
As the sort of fool who's read Ulysses (most of it, anyway) and prides himself on working the Sunday
Times crossword (most of it, anyway) in ink, I eat this stuff up, loving the layers, the gambits, the
allusions. Stoppard always makes me glad I went to college, but here he offers nothing short of
humanities heaven.
Of course that delight carries its own negation: I'd hesitate to recommend Travesties to anybody
even a little reluctant to tolerate its relentlessness, not to mention long speeches detailing the status
of the arts in the dictatorship of the proletariat. There's a distinct languor during Stoppard's second
act, when Lenin holds the floor. Interesting though Vladimir Ilyich may be as he struggles to turn his
theories into politics, the passage probably felt more immediate before the fall of the USSR.
Still, bailing on the play's complexities would mean missing not only its wit but a deeply smart,
wildly energetic, neatly choreographed, often hilarious new production from Remy Bumppo Theatre.
The whole company is delightful under Nick Sandys's direction, but Jeffrey Cummings's Carr, James
Houton's Joyce, and Greg Matthew Anderson's Tzara are each especially marvelous in their own
ways. Anderson in particular gives his character the aspect of a narcissistic dervish. Scott Olson,
meanwhile, is amusingly dry as Carr's man, Bennett, who knows everything about everybody in the
traditional manner of British downstairs help. (The three women--Kelsey Brennan, Meg Warner, and
Jodi Kingsley--are all formidable but subsidiary: this is a work that orbits its Great Men.) Rachel
Lambert's costumes are at once flamboyant and well honed. And, with little oddities like wallpaper
on the wood floor, Joe Schermoly's set supplies an appropriate taste of Dada. v
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