Applause that Refreshes

The Real Thing

Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Amy Segel

At Winthrop House

Through this weekend

ACTING is falsehood. Or so it is in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which a love-entangled quarter of theater people, so used to faking emotions on stage, cannot feel emotions off stage. They resort to biting wordplay that is done to the hilt in the polished but ultimately sterile Winthrop production.

The first scene establishes the play's mood of underlying despair and over-hanging wit. Max accuses his wife Charlotte of infidelity, disputing her claim that she has just returned from a Geneva art auction. Due to Stoppard's cunning, his ambiguous lines refer to either her new lover or her trip. "How's old Geneva then? Frank doing well?" "What?" Charlotte asks. "The Swiss Franc. Is it doing well?" They refuse to address the crisis at hand. Instead, Max digresses on apparently far-out topics which actually parallel the scene's conflict, a technique Stoppard uses and overuses later.

The following scene makes clear that the opening exchange comes from a play written by Henry (Alan Thomas). Characters and relationships overlap from Stoppard's play to the plays within: Charlotte is Henry's wife and plays her on stage; Max is Henry's friend and plays Henry himself. But this fusion of life and art deadens the characters' emotions and makes them self-conscious and evasive.

The first act features almost faultless portrayals of people who do not think but react and take the offensive gracefully. As Henry, Thomas rocks back and forth on his heels. Annie (Molly M. Hoagland) smiles coquettishly and imbues her desire for Henry in all her actions. Max (David McConaughy), the most formulated and differentiated character until then, balances a physical awkwardness with a staid demeanor. Charlotte (Leslie Powell) keeps her nose well in the air. Only rarely do the actors resort to cliched symbols of annoyance, like Powell wrenching her face or Hoagland melodramatically crossing the set.

The second act challenges the actors to make the transition from the conniving to the compassionate side of the same characters, a challenge only Thomas meets. As Henry and Annie fight and smooch it out, Hoagland seems to portray a completely new person. But perhaps this difficulty stems from the problem Henry mentions when he is reworking a play: "I don't know how to write love. It's either childish or its rude."

After an hour dominated by coy postures, it is relieving to see the young innocent Billy (John Ducey) enter the play. The sturdily-built, lumbering Ducey adds a midwestern quality to an otherwise overwhelming British play And for once he and Annie talk about love, the real thing.

It is Henry, though, who cares most about attaining the real thing. be it real love or real literature. Yet throughout the play he is only able to articulate it through clever tirades. He compares real drama to a good cricket bat. He contrasts his dated pop favorites with classical works. While these motifs are entertaining, they seem to be vain attempts to give the play breadth.

So the drawbacks in the Winthrop production of The Real Thing lie primarily with the script, a script which ironically won a Tony Award in 1982 when it hit New York. Though the play is contemporary and fast-paced, Stoppard relies too much on his wit and hardly carries his play beyond a well-ornamented series of love triangles. It may be thought-provoking, but with characters who scare each other with the first sound they make, it cannot be moving.