Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a radiant moment in Tom Stoppard's Hapgood , which opened in revival last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, when Kerner, a Russian physicist and spy, celebrates the littleness of atoms. The public, he explains to the woman he loves, simply doesn't comprehend how minuscule the particles truly are. He tells her, "I could put an atom into your hand for every second since the world began, and you would have to squint to see the dot of atoms in your palm." Some men offer their beloved the moon. Kerner offers his a speck in her palm...
...also a moment in which an artistic credo seems to be lurking, one that, with Stoppardian paradox, might be rendered as: Who sees littlest sees furthest. Ever since he became internationally famous while still in his 20s for his philosophical farce Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Stoppard has been accused of excessive cleverness -- of having a big mind but a small heart. At bottom Hapgood insists that this division is artificial. As Kerner says, "Every atom is a cathedral...
...Lesson, a portrait of a megalomaniacal teacher, reflected dark satire of the powerful. Rhinoceros blended those themes with a manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast. This eccentric mix of humor and horror, of prattle and inarticulate profundity, influenced writers from Tom Stoppard to Edward Albee. The plays are widely taught at colleges and high schools and probably helped shape the surrealist sensibility of much contemporary TV comedy...
...orders something else, because he is in a twilight funk called "a Philadelphia." In The Universal Language, Ives' warmest, newest sketch, a woman with a speech impediment enrolls in a course for a jabberwocky tongue that only she and her teacher speak: English is "John Cleese," stammering is "tongue Stoppard...
Ives is a wondrous wordmaster and, as spiffily directed by Jason McConnell / Buzas, these elfin works could be called Stoppard Lite. But they are really Beckett Brisk, for they are about the creative process, frantic and forlorn, of getting through life. They suggest that all human existence is an improvisatory rehearsal for some grand opening night that may never arrive. Panic is the universal language. And yet, as Ives shows, rewriting life can produce a happy ending. Destiny may be, as his Trotsky says, "only a capitalist explanation for the status quo," but it can also be a sure thing...