July 1 - 7, 2005

The Play’s the Thing

Rude Guerrilla is no match for Stoppard

by CORNEL BONCA

 

Is it possible that in the realm of emotion where we desire to be the most sincere—let’s call it love—that realm where we’re dying to peel away the  affectations and the roles we and the lover play  in order to get to the “heart of the matter,” the penetralium, the “real thing”—is it possible that it’s in that realm that we do the most acting, the  most affecting, the most lying, that it’s there that the heart of the matter and the real thing are at their most endlessly convoluted and elusive?

And then: Is it possible that in the realm of discourse where we desire to be the most honest—let’s call it the art of the stage—that  realm where both artist and audience are dying to drop the dread evasions of ordinary speech and behavior in order to cut straight to the truth, to “the real thing”—is it possible that it’s in that realm where we encounter the most fictionalizing,  the most affectation, the most lying and unreality?

Well, yeah, on both counts.

That’s elementary Shakespeare, in fact, where life’s a stage where we strut and fret, and where a play—not, say, good Danish detective work—is the thing to catch the conscience of a king. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Tom Stoppard, the  British playwright who name checked the Bard in his breakout play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and whose most popular success has been the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, would decide to center a play on a Shakespearean obsession—with the ways love and acting partake of one another.

The play, The Real Thing, originally produced in 1982 and currently playing at Rude Guerrilla’s  small space in downtown Santa Ana, is a sparklingly witty bit of quicksilver meta-theater, where some scenes we think are “real”—that is, acted by actors playing characters whom we’re to think of as real—turn out to be scenes acted by actors playing characters acting a play within the play we’re watching. It’s filled with stirring                               speeches about what makes good theater and what makes good love, and sometimes a speech about one will apply just as well to the other. (When one character begins to rhapsodize about a cricket bat, watch for the play to achieve a high luster.)  The philosophical ground Stoppard covers isn’t new, but his agile delivery of the premise and the sprezzatura of his dialogue are beautiful things to behold.

Also damn hard to pull off. Director Alex Rodriguez has designed the set in the most minimalist of ways—a black couch and a few pieces of ragged furniture against a black wall are about it—which clashes with the high bourgeois  proceedings: a successful playwright and three actors lounging around drinking champagne, talking art in Hyde Park English, and seducing one another. (Rude Guerrilla doesn’t have the space or  the funds to mount haute bourgeois proceedings, granted, but that’s a good reason to mount a  different play.) And Rodriguez hasn’t gotten hold of the menace behind the characters’ sophistication. Either the characters are too obvious in the ways they telegraph their aggressions, or else they’re not obvious enough and the play feels sentimentally soggy, with all that champagne swigging giving a Noel Coward-y aftertaste.

Melissa Petro, as Annie, an actress who steals Henry the playwright from his first wife, has some of the emotional gravitas needed to convey the  complexity of a woman hounded by infidelity,  jealousy, and the demands of art and politics. The other characters: not so much. Richard De Vicariis, who plays Henry, the central character  with easily the best lines, needs to have a lean and sinuous majesty whose cynicism slowly gives way to a belief in the power of love, but De Vicariis doesn’t have the look or the chops to pull it off. He plays the weary playwright as a callow fussbudget. The play’s pretty intellectually challenging, but Rodriguez and his company find themselves barely keeping their English accents afloat, leaving Stoppard’s formidable dramatic insights to sink of their own weight.
Friday, July 1, 2005
'Real Thing' comes up short
Review: Rude Guerrilla's staging gets the surface but not the depth of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play.

By ERIC MARCHESE
Special to the Register

Is any contemporary playwright as fascinated with the concept
of reality vs. artifice in the world of theater as Tom
Stoppard? Time and again, in plays such as "The Real Inspector
Hound" and "The Real Thing," and in films - "Brazil" and
"Shakespeare in Love," for example - Stoppard toys with our
perceptions of what is real and what is staged. Reality and
fiction intermingle, each mirroring the other.
In his 1982 opus "The Real Thing," Stoppard goes us one
better: His focal character is a British playwright named
Henry Boot, a clear mirror of Stoppard himself - the Czech
native was raised in England and, early in his literary
career, used the pen name William Boot. Many a
reality-artifice mirror is planted in the script - some are
obvious and others more subtle, but it's a kick spotting them.
What's gnawing at Henry is that, as deeply as he may be able
to feel love, he has a hard time expressing it. Even more
frustrating, he says, is that his lack of understanding of
"the real thing" - that is, true, passionate love - has
prevented him from writing credible romantic scenes in his
plays.

One can only speculate whether Stoppard himself ever felt a
similar level of frustration, but that doesn't make "The Real
Thing" any less enjoyable. What is frustrating about Rude
Guerrilla Theater Company's new staging at the Empire Theater
in Santa Ana is that Richard DeVicariis' portrayal of Henry
falls far short of expressing what the character is really all
about.

Henry's extramarital affair with Annie (Melissa Petro), a
young actress, evolves into his second marriage. For Annie,
however, Henry is just a single component to her life, not
life itself. Henry's love for her deepens into obsession, and
soon he's consumed with jealousy, convinced she's having
affairs with younger men.

Director Alexander Rodriguez and DeVicariis only partly reveal
Henry's cerebral nature and lofty air of intellectual
snobbery, also coming up short in showing the primal
desperation Henry feels once his intellectual wall begins to
crumble, leaving him vulnerable and scared.
DeVicariis does reveal Henry's passion for the English
language - notably, the written word - and his love of love
and romantic passion, and there's a satisfyingly peevish
quality to some of his second-act scenes. But the hallmark of
his portrayal is a quizzical tone of voice, not nearly enough
to draw us into the man's morphing from an observer of love to
a full-on participant.

Then, too, Petro's Annie is passionate about politics but not
especially convincing as the flirty, alluring femme fatale who
captures Henry's heart, yet cherishes her independence above
all else.

Like his characters, Stoppard's script is urbane and
sophisticated, well-captured by Rodriguez's cast (including
DeVicariis and Petro). Karen Harris invests depths of passion,
sarcasm and loneliness in her reading of Henry's first wife,
Charlotte, a noted stage actress. Troy W. Johnson's Max,
Annie's first husband, portrays a snooty know-it-all (much
like Henry) in Henry's play "House of Cards" and, in "real"
life, a caring young man discarded by Annie as too needy.
As the young actor who would love nothing better than to
seduce Annie, Thomas Fernely fails to generate much sizzle
with Petro. Maria Frisk, though, has a natural stage presence
as Henry and Charlotte's punked-out 18-year-old daughter,
while John Fabricant is forceful as the crude young political
prisoner and would-be playwright whose cause Annie has
undertaken.

Rodriguez's scene design is lean and spare - a few sticks of
furniture - and well-dressed with authentic-looking props
(British magazines and newspapers, for example). The director
also effectively uses pertinent pop tunes ("Love Me Do,"
"You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ") to underscore Stoppard's
themes.