Crisp and witty, with an impeccable cast and sleek production values, Tom Stoppard's THE REAL THING at Studio Theatre will delight theatregoers who have long wishEd Stoppard would stop all his intellectual and political mind-bending and get down to the personal business of love once and for all.
On the other hand, for those of us who have long lov
Ed Stoppard for his ability to infuse deep intellectual argument into the DNA of drama, we will leave the theatre befuddled and wondering where that playwright went.
It is bizarrely puzzling to peel back the layers of Stoppard's THE REAL THING----first produced in 1982 as his first foray both into realism and into the realm of the purely personal---and find so little weighty substance beneath. Which is not to say that Stoppard does not strive for gravitas beneath his web of relationships. For almost half of the play his central character waxes eloquently about love and language and intimacy; in the end, however, none of these intellectual narratives reaches the maturity one expects, and the script oddly disappoints. Surely, we lovers of Stoppard find ourselves saying, this must be a joke, a con, a prank of the first order. Surely, there is another shoe yet to drop. Surely, a deeper structure lies buried here.
But no, THE REAL THING
really is a funny drama about sex and love, specifically, the sex and love of marital affairs.
Studio has masterfully converted the intimate Milton space into an even more intimate theatre in the round, centered by an enormous turntable---as impressive a feat of mechanical engineering as Stoppard's wordsmithing is of the mechanics of language. There, on this spinning stage we are transported to a high-rise, luxury apartment in 1980s London. We meet the semi-autobiographical, philosophizing elitist playwright Henry, who also spins vinyl classics from Bach to Procol Harem and Herman's Hermits in his attempt to assemble the perfect high- to low-brow selection of tunes for his celebrity turn on the BBC's not-so-elitist "Desert Island Discs."
Fluidly directed by David Muse, the 2 ½ hour production zips along. The plays within the play become the play about the playwright in a playhouse revolving in the round. With a stellar performance by the magnificent
Teagle F. Bougere (the lead in Studio's INVISBLE MAN), as the middle-aged, hugely successful playwright Henry, THE REAL THING features an ensemble of polished professionals who imbue their characters with Stoppardesque linguistic facility and Cowardesque disregard for the banal conventionalities of life outside of show biz.
Bougere's Henry is both likable and-for those with short attention spans-exhausting, as he turns every emotional musing or nuance into a philosophical exposé. Henry is married to the actress Charlotte, played with sophistication and wit by
Caroline Bootle Pendergast. Henry is having an affair with the actress Annie, a delightful combination of spitfire and vulnerability as portrayed by
Annie Purcell. The actor Max, sympathetically played by the sweet
Dan Domingues, is married to Annie and is friends with Henry and Charlotte.
Enrico Nassi,
Barrett Doss, and
Tim Getman round out the excellent cast. Nassi's Billy, Annie's younger lover, is a combination of cool womanizer and school boy charmer, whereas Doss' Debbie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Henry and Charlotte, is nearly as quick-witted as her famous father, and, one suspects, too sophisticated for her own good. Finally, Getman's Brody, the odd man out in this script, has that working man, accidental political activist's stupidity down pat.
Muse has put together an excellent production team, led by scenic designer
James Noone, whose precise, minimalist set seamlessly re-configures into numerous locales on the carpeted, human-scale turntable. Lighting by
Brian MacDevitt evokes the many interior settings and moods, from apartments to train cabins, and costume designer
Kaye Voyce captures the quintessential fashions of the early 80s with admirable subtlety. Special applause for sound designer Matthew Nielson, as the transitions from on-stage sounds of the radio or stereo blend smoothly with the swells of transitional music during the scene changes.
Clearly, THE REAL THING is a consummate professional production-regular theatregoers have come to expect no less from
Studio Theatre in the same way we have come to expect no less than conceptual complexity, logical conundrums and linguistic eloquence from
Tom Stoppard himself.
Indeed, as few other living playwrights can, Stoppard routinely compresses the full weight and merit of the English language and challenges us to a full-court intellectual press to keep up with the rigor and rhythms of his thinking. Consider his ARCADIA--beautifully staged at Olney Theatre many years ago---or his ROCK AND ROLL---brilliantly produced at Studio in recent years. Both dare us to fathom such unfathomable Möbius strips as communism, Marxism and rock and roll or chaos theory, mathematics and entropy.
And true, in THE REAL THING there is a lot of language about language, as Stoppard's playwright Henry speaks several times at length about the structure and splendor of words. In a dazzling bit of Stoppardian wordplay, the wordsmith Henry compares the playwright's craft in telling even a droll story to a cricket bat's finely-crafted capacity to hit a ball 200 yards whereas a non-playwright, even with a wonderful story, is but a wooden plank thudding that same ball ten feet at best.
Yet alas, even the master playwright cannot turn this hum-drum story of infidelity into a homerun of the human condition. At best, he can dazzle his audiences with sophistry, particularly if his actors can dazzle---and Studio's actors do indeed dazzle. At a time when reason itself seems under siege----when politicians dismiss centuries of science and even the very principle of scientific inquiry, when legitimate news organizations devote whole segments of the nightly news to celebrity gossip, when civil discourse dwindles to badly spelled exchanges of text messages-one can only wish that the dazzle of Stoppard's eloquence and grace led us to places other than another episode of Entertainment Tonight.
Photo: Scott Suchman
Playing at Studio's Milton Theatre, 1501 14th St., NW, Washington, DC 20005
May 22-June 30, 2013
Info/Reservations: 202-332-3300
www.studiotheatre.org
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