Word: stoppard
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There are certain plays - and this is one of them - that can be called "blender drama" pureed bits of other, better works. The ingredients of Jeff Wanshel's comedy, Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy, are Tom Stoppard, Jules Feiffer and Pirandello, who seems as essential to this brand of ersatz drama...
...stealing from life itself. Not literature or film but history is re-written when Lenin, Tristan Tzara, the Dadist and James Joyce meet in a library in Zurich. Their fictive joint story is told by a character who himself re-writes the story as he goes along. Tom Stoppard's scintillating play, studded with allusions to the radicals' works, which never did as well in New York as it deserved, is playing at the Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, beginning...
...Stoppard laces the proceedings with racy puns, malapropisms and bureaucratese. He scales the evening's comic peak with the interpolated segment called New-Found-Land. Two Foreign Service officers enter the temporarily deserted committee room to discuss an American's application for British naturalization. The elder (Humphrey Davis) is a doddering relict from World War I who embarks on an excruciatingly elongated, hilarious account of how he once secured a cherished ?5 note from Lloyd George. The younger (Jacob Brooke) then launches on a bravura monologue about a train journey across the map of the U.S. that contains...
Director Ed Berman moves the evening along with stopwatch precision. Because of his gift for parody and incessant wordplay, Stoppard's own affinity may be not so much with Wilde and Coward as with S.J. Perelman, a writer whom he greatly admires...
Like Perelman, he is antic, satirical and civilized. At commencement time, college graduates are traditionally welcomed into "the fellowship of educated men." Tom Stoppard uncondescendingly treats all playgoers as part of that fellowship. T.E. Kalem