'Rock 'n' Roll' Is a Tale of Two Acts

Rock 'n' Roll

Written by Tom Stoppard; directed by Carey Perloff; scenic design by Douglas W. Schmidt; costume design by Alex Jaeger; lighting design by Robert Wierzel; sound design by Jake Rodriguez; dramaturg, Michael Paller; dialects and speech, Deborah Sussel; Czech consultant, Draha Herman

Cast in order of appearance:

The Piper, Drew Hirshfield; Esme (younger), Summer Serafin; Jan, Manoel Felciano; Max, Jack Willis; Eleanor, René Augesen; Gillian, Bree Elrod; Interrogator, Robert Parsons; Ferdinand, Jud Williford; Milan, Rod Gnapp; Magda, Bee Elrod; Policeman, Drew Hirshfield; Lenka, Delia MacDougall; Nigel, Robert Parsons; Esme (older), René Augesen; Alice, Summer Serafin; Stephen, Drew Hirshfield; Candida, Marcia Pizzo; Deirdre, Bree Elrod

Performances: Extended through December 13, Huntington Theatre Company, Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Mass.

Box Office: 617-266-0800 or www.huntingtontheatre.org

It's a surefire guarantee that a Tom Stoppard play will make you think. It's also a pretty good bet that you may wish you had an encyclopedia tucked under your theater seat so that you could look up all of the obscure political, cultural and academic references he makes in the course of two and a half hours. There's no denying the man is a brilliant writer and historian, but his plays would be far more accessible if his dialogue didn't so often feel like the oratory of a pretentious ivory tower lecturer.

Stoppard's most recent Broadway offering Rock 'n' Roll, currently being staged by the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, is an infuriating example of how remote his writing can be when he's pontificating and yet how utterly moving his dialogue becomes when he gets off his soapbox and lets his characters speak for themselves. Dense and dry in the first act but surprisingly - and mercifully - warm and engaging in the second, Rock ‘n' Roll is a jarring contrast of cerebral cause and emotional effect.

Juxtaposing between Cambridge, England and Prague, Czechoslovakia during the Cold War years from 1968 through 1990, Rock 'n' Roll explores how cultural and political revolutions are two sides of the same powerful coin. Just as the rock music of British groups like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones loudly mirrored and openly influenced the world's dramatic and dangerously shifting landscape, free-thinking artists and journalists from the Czech Republic surreptitiously made their voices heard through a persistent underground that would not be silenced. Minor musical groups like The Plastic People of the Universe were elevated to heroic cult status by braving numerous imprisonments for the sake of artistic expression. Undaunted by the Soviet occupation that crushed liberal Communist Party reforms and oppressed the most basic freedoms, the Plastics became the symbol of a grassroots movement whose future would not be deterred. The Plastics did nothing more than fight to play the music they loved to play, but in so doing they contributed to a tsunami-like sea change that eventually succeeded in toppling the Berlin Wall. In Rock 'n' Roll, as in reality, music is politics - and the beat relentlessly goes on.

Life goes on, too, in Rock 'n' Roll, and when the play shifts its focus in the second act away from convoluted abstract ideologies onto more intimate everyday concerns, it finally strikes a chord that resonates profoundly. Here Stoppard heeds the very advice that he has his British Marxist academician Max give to his Czech protégé Jan: "Live in the heart, not the head." Suddenly, after chronicling 20 years of global social upheaval, the play moves from intellectual activism to interpersonal engagement. Issues are no longer power, socialism, censorship and repression but love, loss, happiness and self-worth. It seems that once the times become kinder and gentler, so does Rock 'n' Roll.

As the volatile leftist Max and brooding music lover Jan, Jack Willis and Manoel Felciano lack the passion needed to make Stoppard's play really sing. In the first act Willis seems to substitute anger for intensity while Felciano is so cynical and self-absorbed that he appears apathetic instead of obsessed. Both actors mellow and broaden nicely as their characters age in Act II, but neither gives Rock 'n' Roll the kind of sustained driving urgency that so tumultuously transformed the politics and the music of the Cold War's most turbulent decades.

The mother-daughter duo of René Augesen as Eleanor/Esme (older) and Summer Serafin as Esme (younger)/Alice shape much more fully realized characters. Through their performances we experience the impact that one generation's legacy levies upon the next. Augesen is first Max's patient and devoted wife Eleanor, a professor of literature who stoically endures being a breast cancer survivor until the discovery that she is no longer in remission shatters her quiet resolve. Later she reappears as her grown daughter Esme, imbuing the former flower child with a delicate balance of the daughter's sparkling free spirit and the mother's controlled pragmatism. Serafin is equally mercurial as 1968 daughter and 1990 granddaughter - slightly spoiled, rebellious, pouting and ethereally idealistic as the young Esme, then forthright and bubbly as her daughter Alice, a challenging chip off the old block sans the at times depressive counter culture attitude.

Music, of course, plays as important a character in Rock 'n' Roll as any actor on the stage. Too often, however, the songs that are played during scene changes seem incidental rather than integral. Perhaps it's Felciano's low-key performance that robs even the music of its vitality. Without his incendiary passion for the only thing in life that makes Jan feel alive and free, the impact of his obsession is diminished - and with it the music's potency as a force for sweeping cultural and political change.

Ultimately the Huntington's Rock 'n' Roll is a thought-provoking and at times genuinely moving examination of the impact of global revolution on individual everyday lives. It's a good thing the program includes a study guide, though. The notes and essays help answer the many questions that continue to swirl in the mind long after you've left the theater.

PHOTOS BY KEVIN BERNE: René Augesen as Esme and Manoel Felciano as Jan; Jack Willis as Max and Manoel Felciano; René Augesen as Esme and Summer Serafin as Alice