Playwright Tom Stoppard's latest work, "Rock 'n' Roll," rests on the gaping framework of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia from 1968 to 1990. Into this loose formation, he stuffs a play that is alternately about communism, consciousness, pop music, Czech dissidence and ex-Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett -- depending on the moment. The new co-production by Boston's Huntington Theatre Company and San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, directed by Carey Perloff, captures the fragmentary spirit of Stoppard's world even if it misses some of the urgency.
Stoppard's plays are notable for their intellectual inquiry rather than their emotional insight. This attitude has always been misleading, but the Czech-born writer is so clearly wrestling with issues dear to his heart in this piece, that the distinction has little value. "Rock 'n' Roll" is concerned with the gulf between fixity and messy feeling, between politics and the yearning for free space in which creativity can exist.
The story hinges on the relationship between Max (played by Jack Willis), an old Marxist professor at Cambridge, and Jan (Manoel Felciano), his protégé, a Czech student whose top priority is the safety of his record collection. Jan returns home in the wake of the 1968 invasion, ostensibly to protect his mother and socialism. His resistance against the dictatorship though, is embodied by the underground music scene in Prague rather than by intellectual discourse.
As ideologies shift and fade, the play jumps between Prague and the idyllic garden of Max's home in Cambridge. His doctrinaire world becomes softer as the generations of his household develop and pass on. Max is countered by his wife, Eleanor (René Augesen), a scholar of Sappho, an ancient Greek lyric poet, who is dying of cancer, and their daughter Esme (Summer Serafin), a flower child with stronger ties to Jan than either of them realizes.
Esme, as the play opens, is literally serenaded by Barrett, the original Pink Floyd vocalist who was canned for his heavy drug use. He is something of a spirit that floats through the play's development, both appearing to Esme in the garden as the woodland deity Pan and being watched over in his isolation in Cambridge by Esme's own daughter, Alice (also played by Serafin).
It is this spiritual center that helps bring out what is most important to these characters. In the play's most charged demonstration of the limits of thought, the weakened Eleanor rails against Max's dogged materialism, his notion that the mind is not separable from biological machinery, declaring "I am not my body." In one burst of pent-up emotion, Eleanor releases the listlessness that her daughter and granddaughter will likewise go on to feel.
This production falls into some of the traps that make Stoppard's work feel somewhat rootless and unmotivated. Though aided by a disorienting set design that gives the audience the impression of looking up towards the sky from the courtyard of a dry Stalinist building, the atmosphere is largely uncharged and meandering. Augesen and Serafin and Willis, with his roaring manner, imbue some tension into the slowly decaying home life in Cambridge. The complementary action in Prague, however, is drained of some necessary energy.
We are never really given a sense of the stakes of Jan's endeavor. For much of the play, Felciano gives Jan a shambling, disinterested quality that removes most of the tension and danger from his pursuits. His commitment to freedom of expression is not especially captivating because the grim reality against which he is fighting never becomes real and urgent.
The production more effectively focuses on capturing the sense of a drift through time, of a slow unraveling of all fixed notions in these characters' lives. Stoppard is concerned with the cognitive dissonance produced by the slow realization of what one's life has truly been about. Eleanor is not only terrified by Max's attitude that her self is the equivalent of her sickly body, but by his inability to see the world through his love rather than his politics.
"Rock 'n' Roll" beautifully captures the drift through time that eventually forces Jan and Esme to stare in the face all that they have been missing. Near the end, Stoppard reiterates, through the words of Plutarch (an ancient Roman historian), that Pan, that the God of revelry, is dead; the evidence suggests though, that his spirit is alive and well in rock and roll. Decades removed from the joy of youth, these characters are overwhelmed by the thrill of simply feeling something again.
