Why Tom Stoppard was San Francisco's unofficial playwright laureate
Tom Stoppard poses at American Conservatory Theater's studios in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2016, during rehearsal for his "The Hard Problem." (Santiago Mejia/Special to The Chronicle)
Tom Stoppard was brilliant, we critics like to say. What other playwright could have studded his works with plausible lectures on Greek and Latin translation, the existence of God and Zeno's paradox, Marxism and probability and free will?
But his big words, lofty arguments and nuggets of esoterica are only the most obvious signposts of his writing. Stoppard, who died on Nov. 29, at age 88, knew that theater couldn't be mere lecture. We don't go to plays to be talked at.
Tutor Septimus Hodge (Jack Cutmore-Scott, left) celebrates with his bright young student Thomasina Coverly (Rebekah Brockman) in Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" at American Conservatory Theater in 2013. (Kevin Berne)
Instead, the Czechoslovakia-born, Britain-raised artist behind "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Arcadia," "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy and "The Real Thing," among dozens of titles that have helped shape the dramatic canon, also embodied another definition of brilliance. His plays - for years a staple of San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater - blazed with light and warmth.
But Lily, you might protest, in Stoppard's work characters are always droning on and on about the causes of the Russian Revolution, say, or savaging each other for - gasp! - an infelicitous use of the English language. You might roll your eyes at all his professors and writers looking down on the rest of the world and how so many of them older men fawned over by beautiful and witty but less-brilliant women. Where's that feminism of yours now, Janiak?!
Tom Stoppard introduces Carey Perloff during American Conservatory Theater's gala on April 7, 2018, in San Francisco. (Paul Kuroda/Special to The Chronicle)
I grant it all, because Stoppard himself seemed like he would grant it, and not just because he gave his know-it-all characters their comeuppances. Even when Stoppard wrote the most rarefied of sentences - "Save the gerund and screw the whale"; "You remember Dada! - historical halfway house between Futurism and Surrealism" - it wasn't with exclusion but invitation. Isn't this fun, he seems to be saying, extending a hand.
Over and over, his characters finish each other's puns and punchlines, but seemingly coincidentally, like a Rube Goldberg machine happening to click into place. It's all a dance, an endless game of keep-the-balloon-up-in-the-air. In one scene in "Travesties," the dialogue is woven entirely of limericks, and Stoppard keeps topping himself, rhyming "sculpts," "results" and "adults," then "twenty," "plenty" and "cognoscenti."
Carey Perloff and Tom Stoppard rehearse "The Hard Problem" at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2016. (Santiago Mejia/Santiago Mejia / Special to The Chronicle)
As for all those lectures, at their best, they're cogs in stagecraft. In "Jumpers," a professor named George might be harrumphing about moral relativism, but there's a corpse in his bedroom. The intellectual content isn't the (only) point of the scene; it's there to help keep him spectacularly, preposterously unaware of the dead body, farce-style.
And in the first play in "The Coast of Utopia," philosopher Nicholas Stankevich discourses on Kant's notions of noumena and phenomena - and very conveniently looks out the window at the woman he's falling in love with, to use as an example in his tutoring.
Alexander Herzen (Patrick Kelly Jones, right) finds comfort in the arms of his best friend's wife, Natasha Ogarev (Megan Trout), in "Salvage," the third part of Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" at Shotgun Players. (Pak Han)
With all this fizziness, all these larks, you could get a mistaken sense that Stoppard eschewed deep feeling. But look at his subjects - the homosexuality of scholar and poet AE Housman; the untold experience of Shakespeare lackeys sent to their deaths; oppression under Czechoslovakia's Communist Party. For all his eggheads and sophisticates, he always sympathized with the little guy.
Yes, he wrote with a light touch - making the dead spring back to life in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern"; segueing in "Travesties" from an acknowledgment of the "horror" of trench warfare to this line: "I was invalided out with a bullet through the calf of an irreplaceable lambswool dyed khaki in the yarn to my own specification." But that lightness undercut evil's power. It sticks its tongue out at violence and dares it to joke back.
Tom Stoppard poses at American Conservatory Theater's studios in San Francisco on Oct. 9, 2016, during rehearsal for his "The Hard Problem." (Santiago Mejia/Special to The Chronicle)
If Stoppard's work was in conversation with the absurdism of Samuel Beckett, the linguistic inversions of Oscar Wilde and the sweep and scope of 19th-century Russian novelists, that conversation continues in the nested dramas of San Francisco native Christopher Chen. When you begin watching Stoppard's "The Real Thing," only to suddenly realize in scene two that scene one was a play-within-a-play, you can hear a faint echo of Chen tee-heeing alongside the elder statesman, plotting a structural "just kidding" of his own.
At that same lively playwrights' tea party is Tony Award winner and Oakland resident Jonathan Spector. When, in his "This Much I Know," a psychology lecture eventually gives way to a talking portrait of Joseph Stalin, Stoppard seems to be hovering invisibly about the wings, chatting away, too.
Annie (Liz Sklar, left) meets Brodie (Tommy Gorrebeeck) for the first time in Aurora Theatre Company's "The Real Thing" in 2017. (David Allen/Aurora Theatre Company)
Stoppard might have made light of death, but he was always serious about another family of subjects: art, writing and knowledge. Here's Henry in "The Real Thing," hoisting a cricket bat and ball as he speaks: "What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel." Words, he says a page or two later, "deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
His plays marry lust for ideals to physical lust. In "Arcadia," 13-year-old Thomasina is trying to divine what "carnal embrace" means at the same time that she's tasked with proving Fermat's last theorem. In "The Invention of Love," understanding Plato becomes a shorthand for remembering the universe beyond one's own heartbreak: "Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention."
Amanda Ramos as Thomasina Coverly, left, and Max Forman-Mullin as Septimus Hodge in Shotgun Players' "Arcadia" at the Ashby Stage in 2018. (Ben Krantz Studio/Shotgun Players)
In our own era of algorithms and artificial intelligence, where the main value is efficiency, Stoppard's oeuvre stands as a reminder to ask what exactly we're doing all that optimizing for. "Wars are fought to make the world safe for artists," Henry Carr says in "Travesties," before going on to acknowledge that few generals or warmongers would likely put it that way. Still, he continues, "The easiest way of knowing whether good has triumphed over evil is to examine the freedom of the artist." The character of Belinsky takes up a corollary in "The Coast of Utopia": "When the inner life of a nation speaks through the unconscious creative spirit of its artists, for generation after generation - then you have a national literature."
Stoppard has now handed off that unconscious creative spirit to other mediums and conduits. It's up to the rest of us to clear the airwaves of static, to set our dials to the right frequencies, to be in the audience for the next great wordsmith and prestidigitator.
