Word: stoppard
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...Besides, I owed Stoppard. Since the mid-60s, with "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," he has gifted me and countless others with some of the most intelligent, playful, sublime evenings of theater: "Jumpers," "The Real Thing" and the never-to-be-topped "Arcadia," to name three of a dozen offspring of his fertile imagination. Seized by the irresistible impulse to find out what Stoppard had in mind about 19th century Russian socialists, and abetted by the gracious offices of Aisha Labi, TIME Europe's Florence Nightingale for wayward visitors, I entered the National bunker for my Stoppard marathon one autumn...
...finale, "Salvage," started at 7:30 and let out around 10:45. As a theater-binger from way back (the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Nicholas Nickleby," Bill Bryden's production of "The Miracles" for the National), I welcomed the chance for total immersion in non-stop-Stoppard with 2500 like-minded pilgrims...
...Ogarev: discuss their theories of social progress. Anyone? Anyone? Before seeing the plays I boned up on 19th century Russian radicals by reading the fact-packed 88-page program; by the time the lights went down Saturday morning, I felt ready to be a contestant on "Masterminds." Only with Stoppard does the theatergoer have to cram for a show...
...worry. As with Stoppard's last play, "The Invention of Love," the degree of difficulty here was exaggerated. Stoppard is a superb teacher, but he's mainly a showman, a seducer, an intellectual spieler who doesn't dare lose his engaged audience for a moment. Though the play spans 35 years, six countries and a dozen or so complex political philosophies, the contours are clear. Alexander Herzen (played by Stephen Dillane with that knowing, helpless smile he put to such attentive use in the recent revival of "The Real Thing") loves the play of ideas, loves the possibility for constructive...
...passion are precisely those things that can't be put into words; that the roiling impulses that rule are lives are either ineffable or just F---able. But the history of theater is an honor roll of articulate talk; the Greeks and Shakespeare, Corneille and Shaw thought so, and Stoppard is their avatar. Not talk for talk's sake - though why not, when he's so good at it? - but to clarify thorny ideas and to reveal thickety feelings...