directed by blanka zizka
NEWS & NOTES
TOM TERRIFIC - POPULAR PLAYWRIGHT TOM STOPPARD UNCOVERS JEWISH SCENARIO
Jewish Exponent: February 3, 2000
By Michael Elkin
He's the real thing. And in so being, Tom Stoppard pulls out all the stops when scripting for the stage and screen.
More than anything, the protean, playful playwright (his THE REAL THING is now being revived in London prior to another Broadway run) and scintillating screenwriter (he scripted the Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love") has a love affair with language, spinning body English on each and every word as it twists and turns in a tumble of talent from page to page.
Indeed, Stoppard is a man of verbal acrobatics, a trickster on a scripted trampoline who sends words bouncing off on brilliant trajectories.
Just check the Czech native's checkboard-like credits, with his myriad moves from plays to film to TV to radio, and understand why JUMPERS, one of his first plays staged in America some 30 years ago, is an appropriate anthem for a writer whose words abound with animation.
One of his latest efforts, THE INVENTION OF LOVE, receives its East Coast premiere at the hands of The Wilma Theater and company co-artistic director Blanka Zizka from Wednesday, February 9 to Sunday, March 26, at the Center City theater.
THE INVENTION OF LOVE boasts a typically inventive Stoppard scenario, this one about scholar/poet A.E. Housman, who dreams he is dead and is taken on a bumpy boat ride back to the days of his boyhood and early scholastic - and romantic - pursuits.
But that's just the part of the Stoppard story making news these days; the other part centers on the writer's recent foray back to his religious roots.
The author of theater's ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD revived talk about his Jewishness recently, penning a late 1999 magazine piece about it.
In the first first-person article he has written on the topic, Stoppard revealed and reveled in his discovery that he is "fully" Jewish - he previously thought that just his father had been Jewish - and that his legacy includes that of family members who were victims and survivors of the horrors of the Holocaust.
Indeed, rooting out his Jewish roots, England's esteemed playwright discovered that life can script a stunning scenario all its own.
But why write about such revelations now, years after he discovered them? The dramatist's dramatic bylined article is a byproduct of a request, he says candidly.
"Well," says Stoppard in an exclusive interview about his talk-of-the-town comments in Talk, the new magazine edited by Tina Brown, "I've known Tina since she was a teenager and when she asked me to write a piece for the magazine, I told her that, Tina, there is nothing I want to write about currently."
So, instead, he mined the recent past, converting to print conversations he had had with friends and relatives and revisiting a riveting tour he had had of his native Czechoslovakia, far beyond his adopted home of England.
"I didn't consciously say to myself that I will now sit down and deal with this," he says of his article's articulate sojourn to the past where his Jewishness was uncovered.
Indeed, the Talk topic doesn't have him talking of catharsis; rather, he says, "It left me with a combination of feeling detached and engaged."
The engaging writer, whose theatrically mixed marriages of mirth and mischief have landed him an extended honeymoon with critics and public alike, concedes that sorting out his Jewish identity is "hard to describe."
"There are responses to it from separate parts of my self," he says. "On the whole, I am moved and interested by it."
The moves that he puts on his words - verbiage that vies for attention in unusually Arcadian atmospheres set on the stage - would seem part and parcel of his past. But don't go looking to take a dip in the deep end of the genetic pool with the suggestion that his love of language is inherently Jewish.
No, in fact, his love of non-linear linguistic usage isn't aligned with anything particularly Jewish, he says.
Indeed, his plays, which play games with time and space, are not bounded by the demands of any one group. Prior to the triumph of ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN on Broadway 33 years ago, Stoppard had been made to feel wary of American audiences, having heard rumors that their attention spans had no room for complex plots and non-Aristotelian time frames.
The author of TRAVESTIES considers such thinking a travesty of justice, an insult to the American mentality. His works play to packed houses all over this country, he says. And no one is scared off when his plays deploy "a non-linear narrative."
This, he says of the inward and inverted vagaries of THE INVENTION OF LOVE, was not invented only for attuned aesthetes. "It's not supposed to be a play for a splinter group," he says, "but one of general appeal."
His appealing screenplays have found wide audiences, too, although Stoppard stops the conversation in mid-word when talk of his film career is brought up. "I don't have a screen-writing career," he says mischeviously.
"I do [scripts] periodically - if one appeals to me."
Certainly such efforts as "Billy Bathgate," the aforementioned "Shakespeare in Love" and "The Empire of the Sun" have expanded his fictional fiefdom to include Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard.
To be or not to be called a screenwriter is not a question in his life, however. "I've never originated a film," he says.
The reel thing is "not part of my true life as a writer."
Truth be told, his write stuff focuses on comedy. "Everything I've ever written works as a comedy on one level or another," and all of his pieces transcend national notions of humor. "American audiences," he says, "laugh in the same places as audiences do in England."
Surprisingly, the writer whose mind seems an amazing maze of mapped plans and projects takes one road at a time when it comes to plotting his career.
His theatrical basis? "I've never head more than one idea at a time. Every time I finish one work, I am at the beginning once more."
His staged time frame is one clocked in years. "I seem to let four years go by between my full-length plays," he chuckles.
With a theatrical sensibility to the vicissitudes of life, this onetime journalist reports he sometimes thinks back to my [Jewish] roots but to what my life would have been like if we would have all [stayed in] Czechoslovakia," rather than moved to England in 1946, when his mother remarried, to an Englishman, and relocated the whole family there.
The playwright has a word for his feelings on the relocation: fortunate.
Had he not tried his talents to the British stage in his newfound land, it is quite possible that the Czech-born wordsmith's brilliant badinage would have been lost in the translation. After all, a recent check of Czech writers shows that the country has not hosted a hot new playwright over the years - with the notable exception, of course, of Vaclav Havel, its past president.
"I am quite fortunate," says Stoppard in plain English, "to have been deflected into a culture that has the richest language for a writer to use."
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