DC area fans of Tom Stoppard have a great opportunity to see another excellent production of Rock ‘n’ Roll (RNR) playing within a four-hour drive, at the Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theater (PICT) until 5/30.  Located on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, PICT is a professional company focusing on performances of high quality, text-driven classical and modern theater.

Sir Thomas will be pleased to note, as was this reviewer, that the same loving attention that was lavished on the Studio Theater’s twice-extended production of RNR (see review below for background) was devoted to PICT’s exciting season opener.  Directed with clarity and imagination by Andrew Paul and aided by his talented team, this production offers a different perspective of the rock music scene and political events unfolding in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1990.  By performing RNR on a proscenium or thrust stage, employing digital still and moving images, introducing a character (The Piper or Syd), reconfiguring the blocking, sifting through class, and using clever stage business, a clearer, more moving story emerges.     

The three leads are strongly cast.  This time around I see them less as idealists, more as characters with blindspots – emotional and intellectual. Max (Sam Tsoutsouvas) is the grandmaster who can calculate combinations several moves ahead, but alas, misses the relative worth of the pieces in front of him; the workers of the world will never unite. Mr. Tsoutsouvas, who was recently seen in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Ion (see review below) gives us a Max with great range, from the local to the global through the tender to the tempestuous.  Jan’s (Sam Redford) development seems arrested:  did he really believe the Czech Communist party would let him back in to practice the personal good of Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore?  Played without a hint of realpolitik by the savvy Mr. Redford, Jan is like the friends we all know who are perpetually stuck at a certain point in time; forever young, the responsibilities of a family and a life pass them by as they age in place, pursuing their enthusiasms.   Both Jan and Max have misplaced romantic views about their respective countries.

As if to balance and emphasize the father - son, teacher - student dynamic of Max and Jan, Mr. Stoppard has the same actor play both the mother and the daughter at different periods.  Eleanor and Esme (Helena Ruoti) characters are romantics seeing their lives embodied as a soul or poetic vision.  Helena Ruoti as Eleanor, dying of cancer, is tenacious as she clings to her teaching principles, her life, and Max, in that order; playing her daughter Esme, Ms. Ruoti is equal parts distracted and free-floating.  We cannot miss the irony that the intellectual superstars Max and Eleanor attempt to establish their filial bonds through their protégées and students and not their own daughter; neither that the childless Jan does so through his records and his friends.  All will feel a sense of betrayal when these surrogates don’t pan out!     

The first act opens on this sparsely designed stage (Narelle Sessons) using plastic tables and chairs (Lily Junker) available from any big box store, with an outdoors green color palette and similar lighting (Jim French).  This combines handily with the projection design (Jessi Sedon), which uses an eight pairs plus two arrangement of screens, to tell the story and move it along.  Rather than jump (or smash) cutting or fading to dark, the imaging and music work to set up a fluid and informative transition from one place or time period to the next one.  As we move from Cambridge to Prague, where the setting is more of a crash pad, and hues and costumes (Erin Rittling) appear darker to match the mood, the story unfolds in an expository manner, with some tradeoff between meanings – you have a better understanding of what is going on – and humor – you lose some of the jokes.  Nonetheless, the RNR is recognizable from the Studio’s production or even a one-time reading:  The second act – wow! – it looks almost like an entirely different play.  Rather than stage it as a comedy of manners PICT gives it another look: sort of an Angry Young Men Meet Street Theater.  The act examines class head on and locks horns with governments, tabloid journalism, mass consumption, and moral posturing.  Esme and her husband Nigel along with their daughter Alice are not speaking the King’s English in manner or thought.   

Mr. Paul has solved any doubts I had about the ending of the play.  The playwright’s conclusion seemed initially too pat, with happy couples paired all around and a celebratory concert waiting in the wings.  I thought some ambiguity was called for in the conclusion. However, the tension is so exquisitely ratcheted up in the decisive scene that when Esme has her affirmative moment, the audience explodes and everyone’s cheering them along.  Moreover, the use of the Piper (or Syd) to bear constant witness to the desires and foibles of human nature, even serving as a photographer of a hopeful tableau, seems to bless the proceedings. By interspersing the conclusion with a recitation and examination of Sappho’s “The great god Pan is dead,” separately highlighted at the back of the theater between the teacher Lenka and the student Alice, we see a successful passage of knowledge from the mentor to the mentee, from one generation to the next.  We are hopeful for the outcome of the characters, one in which they all have had to struggle mightily, and one that feels earned.       

Lenka, played with delightful abandon and certitude by Tami Dixon, is a comic role for any actress to die for, and she does her proud.  Anwen Darcy playing briefly the younger Esme and at length Alice, gives a performance of verbal and temperamental agility, dropping her aitches in all the right places.  The talented Simon Bradbury is alternately sinister and conniving as the Interrogator and Nigel.  PICT regular Jarrod DiGeorgi plays the bearer of bad tidings Ferdinand, who gets the signatures and the girl and will have you rethinking the adage about knowing your friends, and Martin Giles gives a deft portrayal as Max’s handler Milan and a Policeman.  Gabriel King convincingly walks the fine line as a family newcomer and independent thinker (Max’s foil) Stephen while Diana Ifft just as knowingly manages to slip in her own version of meet and greet as Candida (oh how Stoppard must have enjoyed this Shavian riposte!)  Joshua Kiley as the roving and mostly silent Piper lets his poetry and music do the talking.           

The choice of music in general is an apt metaphor for the undermining of political events of the times.  In particular, rock and roll has been a great leveler: of race, class, age, power, and creed – the low and downtrodden rub shoulders with the high and mighty, as do the young and old, of all diversities, at all socio-economic levels.  Like religion, politics and music are changed into “something rich and strange” as they are transported to different geographies and cultures.  In England Marxism is an intellectual game of one-upmanship; in Czechoslovakia it’s the odd man out.  Music of protest in the twentieth century is based on jazz, itself derived from the black experience – spirituals, ragtime, blues – and gave rise to rock and roll.  Rather than The Unbearable Lightness of Being as background for the society and music that gave rise to RNR, I would recommend the interested reader to Milan Kundera’s book The Joke.  In addition to the absurdist world described, he pointed to the similarity between jazz and the folk music prevalent in Central Europe: the six-tone scales, the dependence on improvisational and similarities in rhythm and melody.  When the Party singled out folk music at the expense of jazz, not only had the horse left the barn, the edifice remaining was a national landmark.  The seeds of its undoing were sown at the beginning much as Stephen will point out to Max about the start of the Soviet Revolution.          

Dramaturgically, the attempt to have Czech characters use accents when speaking in English to the English and using normal English in speaking to each other in their own country, has yet to work. To an American audience, the normal speaking “Czech” voices sound all over the place.  I might try using one uniform accent, whatever it is, or pick out some Czech body language or verbal tics or mannerisms, and substitute them to distinguish.  

PICT at the Charity Randall and Henry Heymann theaters, located in Oakland section of Pittsburgh, is in an ideal cultural setting, across the street from the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, and next to Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning, where we started our day by visiting the Nationality Rooms, including those of the Czechoslovak and Irish nations (Google The Nationality Rooms for complete listing).  There are five performances of RNR remaining; refer to their website www.picttheatre.org for dates and times as well as upcoming shows for this season.

Sound check:  High decibel levels reached during scene changes

Program notes: Outstanding.  In addition to the program, which provides numerous articles, a detailed glossary of the text, prepared for the Wilma Theater’s March 2008 production, is offered for 5 dollars. It is more than worth it.

Applause meter:  Highly recommended, 4 hands.

Runtime: 2 hours and 35 minutes with 1 intermission     

Photo credits: Suellen Fitzsimmons