DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION<\/strong>: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard\u2019s Rock\u2019n\u2019Roll <\/em>didn\u2019t get placed in a timely fashion. I\u2019ve decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on whether or not to include the bits specific to this production, but ended up keeping them in, since this was not only the best Stoppard I\u2019ve seen by far but the best Studio Theatre production I\u2019ve seen by far. I want you guys to know that they can really <\/em>knock it out of the park. Into this reverse-ostrakon of historical popularity, Tom Stoppard has thrown an unexpected name: the Great God Pan.<\/p>\n His play Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll<\/em>, in an intimate production at Washington, D.C.\u2019s Studio Theatre through June 21, dramatizes the clash between the \u201ccultural Left\u201d and the more strictly political Left in the last half of the Cold War. Yet all the play\u2019s oppositions\u2013culture vs. politics, eros vs. reason, soul vs. matter\u2013are embodied in the complex relationships between finely-drawn, resonant characters. The sentimentality which sometimes mars Stoppard\u2019s work is absent. It\u2019s a comedy, and a love song, but its joys and reconciliations are hard-won.<\/p>\n Studio\u2019s actors are completely engaging, and the small theater space makes everything immediate: You can smell the joss-sticks. It is weird sitting quietly, occasionally clapping, as the actors explore the ecstatic release of a great guitar riff. There\u2019s no way around that, given the bourgeois nature of just about any American audience who would come to see a Stoppard play. But the play is good enough to overcome our habitual complacence.<\/p>\n The first scene presents Great Pan in the unlikely form of Syd Barrett, crouching on a stoned hippie teen girl\u2019s garden wall. We then set up the tension which will define the play: It is 1968 and Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. In Cambridge, half-feral British Communist Max is growling at half-dissident Czech Jan, as Jan decamps for home: \u201cI said, \u2018You. I\u2019ll take you,\u2019 because you were serious and you knew your Marx\u2026 and at the first flutter of a Czech flag you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.\u201d Max does offer the self-consciously ironic machismo of apologizing to Jan \u201cabout the tanks.\u201d <\/p>\n Max is a bitter-ender: \u201cWhy do people go on as if there\u2019s a danger we might forget Communism\u2019s crimes, when the danger is we\u2019ll forget its achievements?\u201d He feels piercingly the humiliation of his position:<\/p>\n I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he\u2019s fascinated by me. He\u2019s never met a Communist before. I\u2019m like the last white rhino.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (One of the many subtle touches in this play is the way Max\u2019s rationalism lands him in cruelly absurd situations.) His materialism gives no quarter to fuzzy-headed talk of \u201cinspiration\u201d or \u201csoul\u201d: The meat is all there is. This belief gets one of the funniest smackdowns in a very funny play, when his wife\u2019s student Lenka says he believes a human is a \u201cpinball machine which thinks it\u2019s in love.\u201d But Max also gets one of the play\u2019s most wrenching lines, after his wife accuses him and his materialism of collaboration with the cancer which is killing her.<\/p>\n Max is the sort of man who says, \u201cA worker\u2019s state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work.\u201d Max\u2019s marriage lasts until his wife\u2019s death. He\u2019s the Communist bourgeois.<\/p>\n Jan, meanwhile, just wants to listen to his records. His return to Czechoslovakia is something of a road-not-taken for Stoppard: As the playwright explains, \u201cHe was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.\u201d Back behind the Iron Curtain, Jan spends his time playing rock music, maneuvering around the police, and arguing against politics. The cops force all his employers to fire him, then arrest him for being a \u201cparasite\u201d\u2013in a pointed callback to an earlier scene in which Jan praised British freedoms, and Max snapped that in England \u201ceveryone\u2019s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it\u2019s absolutely legal to be unemployed.\u201d<\/p>\n Here again materialism matters, though the play doesn\u2019t hammer it home. A cop can hit you in the face. A cop can bash in your head. A cop can control the meat. If, as the anti-Nazi resistance song says, \u201cThoughts are free,\u201d it is only because there is something irreducible, a soul which can\u2019t be destroyed by hitting it.<\/p>\n This is part of the importance of the recurring pagan metaphors. As Eleanor, Max\u2019s wife, translates Sappho for a student: \u201cEros is amachanon<\/em>, he\u2019s spirit as opposed to machinery, Sappho is making the distinction. He\u2019s not naughty, he\u2019s\u2013what? Uncontrollable. Uncageable.\u201d<\/p>\n At first Jan and Ferdinand are sharply opposed in their ways of existing under totalitarianism. Jan accuses Ferdinand of \u201cmoral exhibitionism\u201d for his constant petitions and protests. Jan argues that his rock musicians\u2013preeminently the Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe\u2013have found a deeper form of rebellion against tyranny:<\/p>\n FERDINAND: Who\u2019s got the best chance of getting Husak\u2019s attention\u2013Havel or the Plastic People of the Universe? At first Ferdinand is exasperated. After he meets the Plastics\u2019 impresario in prison, however, he comes to Jan with convert\u2019s fervor:<\/p>\n FERDINAND: He explained about the hair. The tempter says, \u201cCut your hair just a little, and we\u2019ll let you play.\u201d Then the tempter says, \u201cJust change the name of the band and you can play.\u201d And after that, \u201cJust leave out this one song\u201d\u2026. It is better not to start by cutting your hair, Jirous said\u2013no, it is necessary. Then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country. Why couldn\u2019t you have explained this?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This play is passionate about the transformative power of music\u2013the moral force of joy. But it is not na\u00efve. Stoppard hints that perhaps rock\u2019s transformative power is not the same in the liberated West as in the repressed Eastern Bloc: Although Jan\u2019s line, fairly early in the play that \u201cthe Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics\u201d gets a laugh, by the play\u2019s end the primary representative of Western rock is the aging Syd Barrett, shambling through the eternal present of late-stage drug addiction. And one of the sharpest exchanges in the play is this one, toward the very end:<\/p>\n MAX: There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day\u2026. What happened to it? The last time the gods are mentioned, Lenka is in Cambridge, as a student of her own reads from Plutarch: \u201c\u2026and Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore\u2013Great Pan is dead!\u201d The play ends in the Czech Republic, because it has to, because the joy of liberation depends on who\u2019s liberated from what. It\u2019s possible to read the play\u2019s gentle ending as a statement that the time of the gods has passed, and we are now in a time of humanity. But even this is a much too reductive reading of a play which is, like the ecstatic soul, irreducible.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard\u2019s Rock\u2019n\u2019Roll didn\u2019t get placed in a timely fashion. I\u2019ve decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Now that Europe\u2019s \u201cshort 20th century,\u201d 1914 \u2013 1989, is over, everyone\u2019s fighting over who gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet empire. How much to Gorbachev, how much to Reagan, how much to John Paul II?<\/p>\n
JAN: The Plastics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
JAN: If pornography was available, the poetry would have sold like poetry in the West.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n