Not Quite `Classic'

The Real Thing

At the Dunster House Dining Hall

Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Melissa Lane

THE REAL THING is a play about people who do everything to avoid reality. The characters, a group of playwrights and actors, hide behind their words and lines in a collective cerebral effort to avoid that most precarious of danger zones, the human heart. A popular offering for perennially over-intellectualized Harvard audiences, this Tom Stoppard play, like a Woody Allen film, could be about what happens to Harvard students when they grow up.

As in most of his works, Stoppard creates a confusion of plots and sub-plots, plays within plays, an inversion of theater and reality. Art imitates life and life imitates art.

Henry (Andrew Bakalar), a playwright, leaves his actress-wife Charlotte (Ellen Harvey) for Annie (Beth Colt), another actress, who leaves her actor-husband Max (Tim Fleck) to marry Henry. The irony for the audience is that we've already seen this happen in one of Henry's plays.

The double irony is that because their relationship is based on original deception, their extramarital affair, it has no chance of working. Annie and Henry cling blindly to the marriage anyway, thinking that they've found the real thing. Soon love degenerates to lust, commitment becomes a bargain, and everything is a big disappointment.

IF THIS PLOT sounds a bit impenetrable and hard to follow on paper, then Stoppard has succeeded. His plays are made to be performed, not described. So if you have not yet seen The Real Thing on Broadway or in one of its other incarnations, that's a good enough reason to go see it at the Dunster House Dining Hall. And that may be the only reason to see it at Dunster, where the production proves itself to be rather lifeless and uninspired.

Usually, all the plot intricacies and convolutions in a Stoppard play will bewilder the audience, sucking them into the Sysiphean task of figuring out the play. Stoppard's funny and impassioned dialogue demands some sort of response.

In the Dunster production. the actors fail to enunciate, to interact, and to grasp the meaning of their lines. The audience is left helpless.

Speaking about a political prisoner whose cause she's espoused, Annie says to Henry, who is clearly a Stoppard alter-ego, "You think that he can't write and he thinks that that's all you can do." Since writing may possibly be the only thing that Stoppard can do-and he does it pretty well--his words are worth respecting.

To be fair, each actor individually does well, but as an ensemble they lack cohesion. Lines evaporate. Little carries across the stage. And along with the passion, the humor in the dialogue--a Stoppard play should be a rollicking experience--is lost as well.

To their credit, the actors in some of the more minor roles are terrific. As Charlotte and Henry's rebellious daughter who is planning to run off with her hipster boyfriend, Kim Raver makes a brief, tattered-jean appearance and gives a terrific speech on What It's All About. As Billy, a young actor who seduces Annie as she spirals away from marital bliss, Allie Dreier is wholesomely lecherous. And Ellen Harvey gives a truly nonchalant and terribly British performance as Charlotte, Henry's cuckolded ex-wife who refuses to act cuckolded. Of the more major players, Beth Colt lacks conviction as Annie, but more than compensates with her stage presence and ethereal beauty.

A lot of the play's problems result from a simple lack of space. The Real Thing is extremely physical, with constant exits and entrances, and the stage is too small to accommodate all of the action. The set changes are also a bit awkward and anti-climactic in the cramped quarters.

Perhaps with a bit more practice, the actors will achieve the necessary unity to pull off a Stoppard play convincingly. It would certainly be a worthy aspiration.