Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Two Fine Productions - Travesties and Infinity

Sometimes the theatre deities align and you manage to see very well constructed and well produced plays back to back.  In my case, I saw a very nice production of Tom Stoppard's Travesties in Montreal on Sat. evening, and then Infinity at Tarragon last night.  Both run for another 2.5 weeks or so.  Actually Athol Fugard's Nongogo was also good, but I saw it on its last performance in Toronto, so not much point in promoting it too much.

Then I have a weekend off, then it looks like I will make it to the George F. Walker plays, which should be good -- if perhaps just a bit reminiscent of Reza's God of Carnage -- and also Robert LePage's Needles and Opium at Canadian Stage.  This is a production directed by LePage (though he will not perform in it, as he did in The Far Side of the Moon in Vancouver).  The same production is slated to go up in Ottawa a bit later in the season.  So I'll see if I feel as overwhelmed by theatre magic that weekend.

What was particularly intriguing about Stoppard's Travesties is that there is also a production in Chicago by Remy Bumppo, which I would have loved to see.  However, after a bit of digging, my feeling is that the production at the Segal Centre was a slightly stronger production, particularly in terms of casting (though I thought they gave James Joyce a slightly aggressive lilt), but the audience in Chicago was surely more receptive to the play itself.  Roughly 1/3 of the audience in Montreal decamped at the intermission, though that gave me more room to stretch out.  The man on my other side stuck around and we both laughed at roughly the same places.  But Travesties is a very difficult piece, mostly aware of just how clever it is, and there is not of genuine emotion to be wrung from it.  It is also quite demanding.  One really must be quite familiar with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and have read Ulysses, particularly Sections 14 and 17. A working knowledge of the art movement Dada is helpful and perhaps just a bit of background knowledge of the Russian revolution.  While I thought Stoppard was mostly just name-checking Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, apparently he is also directly parodying their opera Patience, particularly where women swoon over poets declaiming their poetry.  (This is probably the one major gap in my background knowledge coming into Travesties -- I think I caught everything else.)

Travesties is a challenging, cerebral piece, just a bit more serious than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the discussion of the importance of art or its lack of meaning during wartime, but not tackling anything in a sustained way as he does in Arcadia (and of course Arcadia has true "heart").  Well, it is a very difficult play to get correct, and I thought the production in Montreal was probably the closest I'll ever see to an ideal one, and I suspect the Remy Bumppo one is also quite good.

Infinity is a bit closer to Arcadia in that some heady scientific theories are tossed about fairly casually, including how string theory might be unified with "regular" quantum mechanics and, more intriguingly, that Einstein was wrong and that time does exist and is real, i.e. it is not simply a construction arising from how quickly two (celestial) bodies pass each other.  Interestingly, there is a consulting physicist involved in the play, Lee Smolin, who made the physics at least plausible on the surface, though the actual implications of this theory and anything truly daunting, i.e. actual math, was not incorporated into the script.*  That's pretty much standard.  Proof takes the same approach, talking about math, but using metaphors that basically just convince the audience that the character is smart -- and certainly smarter than the audience.  I wouldn't really expect anything more, as a Venn Diagram of people who go to plays and those who are willing to grapple with actual math or science on stage would show a nearly empty set -- two circles with almost no overlap.  I am struggling with this in Corporate Codes, since I would like to walk the audience through some basic cryptography, but have already started cutting it back.

At any rate, here are two positive, mostly spoiler-free reviews from the Star and Now.  My review will have SPOILERS, so turn away if you don't want things SPOILED.

As Eliot (the physicist in the play) might say, you can't undo time and make it run backwards, and you can't unsee a SPOILER, so this is your last chance.

This play was almost entirely about the emotional lives of really smart people who neglect their loved ones and family because they are so driven.  I related to this really well, particularly how annoyed Eliot was when Carmen asked him why he was working so hard in the middle of the night when his dissertation was complete.  His response was basically what difference does it make what I do when you are asleep.  That's basically how I think about things.  I saw myself in the "deal" that they had for him to take the time to finish his dissertation, even though they had a new baby. (Indeed I wrapped up final revisions while staying up late with the night shift, watching over our newborn son and was actually pretty good at rocking his little chair with one foot while working at the computer.  Multi-tasking all the way...)  Carmen has to put her foot down and threaten to start sleeping with other men (or worse, call his mother) before Eliot will even agree to have lunch with her one day a week as he tries to wrap up his dissertation.  I routinely had/have to force myself to leave work to make it home by 8 pm, and I still generally work in the evenings after the kids are in bed.  Indeed, I don't want to write about it too much, but let's just say my current position has a poor work-life balance and not even much intellectual stimulation, so it isn't a particularly sustainable situation.  I do spend time with my family, but it generally has to be on my terms -- an outing or a cultural event -- though I do try to just take the kids to the park or to the swimming pool.  Finding a balance is incredibly difficult.

Carmen is incredibly frustrated by her situation, though the reviewers, particularly from Now, seem to miss the point that she has not given up her career -- she is composing symphonies and violin concertos -- and getting them recorded.  However, she does have to take charge of most of the household duties and feels abandoned most of the time by her brilliant husband, who still rarely makes time for her.  While I think the playwright is a bit more balanced in understanding what drives workaholics, both reviewers feel that Eliot has poor priorities.  However, he is supposedly the most brilliant physicist to come along in a generation, and he feels an obligation to get his ideas out there, which means working really, really hard.  Carmen has a shot at immortality, leaving a recorded legacy which will outlast her, and yet she resents it when Eliot focuses on his final paper, which revolutionized physics.

Anyway, during a popular lecture on timekeeping, Eliot suffers a seizure and collapses.  This brought me back to when my mother collapsed at work.  She never recovered and passed away within a week.  Eliot finds out he has brain cancer and only 1-2 months to live.  Carmen simply can't believe that he wants to spend much of his time writing, but he's too sick to leave the hospital even, so what else would he do.  How much can you say to your wife, other than you'll miss her?  They have a brilliant but difficult daughter, who is 8 at the time (and did that hit hard!) and she seems to understand death but then asks when will she see him again after they put him in the box in the ground.  There isn't anything one could really do or say with an 8 year old that will make it better when they are in their early 20s.  So I was very much in accord with Eliot, even his choices about work, which most others couldn't understand.  But his work was important, and mine certainly does not rise to that level.  Clearly, the most difficult thing is watching how troubled his daughter was as a young adult, but even there I think the impact of parenting is somewhat overstated.  Most of us Gen X'ers were raised in sort of a state of benign neglect, and it seems lame (to me) that all emotional trauma is to be laid at the feet of parents who aren't helicopter parents.  Ideally, parents provide a safe haven, but mostly let kids work things out on their own, so that they can gain independence.  Quality of interaction time and treating children and their idea/emotions as worthy of respect probably matters more than the sheer quantity of time spent with children.  And yet and yet and yet...

I guess the bottom line is that there really aren't that many plays about smart people and the sacrifices they make (both good and bad), so I do recommend this play, even though it will probably make one feel incredibly guilty if one is a moderate to extreme workaholic.  I was correct in my prediction that I would prefer it over Cake and Dirt.  These people are productive members of the intelligentsia, whereas MacIvor's characters are essentially parasitical.  I know not every play can or should be reduced to class terms or how "productive" the characters are, but seeing Travesties and Infinity back to back does encourage such comparisons, particularly given Lenin's long speeches about art in the second act -- and of course how Stalin took off the kid gloves and, perhaps inadvertently, made artists incredibly relevant during his reign.  I'm not sure even Stoppard could make Stalin an interesting, fully-rounded character, but perhaps some day he will try, after writing about Lenin in Travesties and adding a couple of cameos for Marx in The Coast of Utopia.  At any rate, it is late, and I am running out of steam, but I did want to share my thoughts on these two productions, both of which deserve to be seen.

* I found out too late that Smolin actually gave a lecture, presumably on the physics in Infinity, on April 11, though I don't see how I could have made that as I was taking my son to a concert at TSO at the same time.  Too bad, as that might have been really interesting.

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