Word: stoppards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that, as Stoppard says, is a thought. James Joyce as I knew James Joyce, in Zurich in 1918: a myopic drunken Irishman; bloody pacifist. Or Lenin, a ripple in the seemingly endless stream of refugees and cafe plotters, writing Imperialism in the public library. Lenin as I knew Lenin. The Lenin I knew, or if memory serves, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov: short, balding, desperate to lead the revolution finally taking place in Russia. A snowball in hell-wants to turn the civilized world into a standing committee of workers' deputies. Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Travesties opens with a dark Flander...
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...
...cast of the American Place Theater is able and energetic. Someone like Tom Stoppard - the real Tom Stoppard - might have turned such loans from other writers into dramatic capital of his own, making Isadora a kind of inspired, transcendental comic strip. For all his borrowings from his betters, Wanshel, however, has forgotten the one essential ingredient of good drama: the play wright's own voice...
...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...
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