‘Travesties’ Uncorks A Fizzy Good Time

Have coffee instead of wine with dinner—you will want to pay attention!—and bring your wits to fine tune. Bay Street Theater and Sag Harbor Center for the Arts is delivering an effervescent romp through Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning “Travesties.”

Buckle up for the ride and let the cerebral bubbles flow.

The setting is cicra-1917 Zurich, Germany, at the end of World War I and inside the mind of one Henry Carr, a minor British consul there, and his possibly real—yet sometimes imaginary—antic interactions with characters passing through Switzerland where, as Carr points out, even the cheese has holes in it. Among them are writer James Joyce, communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the father of Dada, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and their various womenfolk.

Did Carr actually even meet all of these people, let alone have them in the same room? Of course not. But why spoil the fun? Art belongs to dada!—“Dada, dada, dada!” as Carr would articulate.

Sit up and listen carefully, but it’s likely you will still catch only half of all the irony embedded in the interlocutions—they come too fast and furious, which is the cerebral sport of the work.

It is Carr’s memories that Stoppard gambols through with wicked puns, literary references and madcap insouciance, and actor Richard Kind brilliantly bounds and frolics through the role. Mr. Kind uses his considerable heft and comic gift to wring the glorious zaniness out of Stoppard’s impossibly layered poetry.

Mr. Kind leers, he grimaces, he commands our attention whether he is extolling the quality of khaki in his war trousers, recalling Lenin—“whose greatness was never in doubt,” he says—or skirting over his troubles with that genius he mostly recalls as a snit: Joyce.

In the opening monologue, an older Carr looks back over his life while wearing a tatty bathrobe and porkpie hat. It’s a challenging soliloquy that Mr. Kind delivers with the skill of a sommelier uncorking a magnum of Krug. Later, Mr. Kind as the young Carr is suddenly and surprisingly lithe and nimble, as he woos and ultimately wins the left-brained, right-hearted librarian, Cicely, acted by Emily Trask.

Now really, what is the play about, you ask? Aye, there’s the rub, to quote from someone whose No. 18 Sonnet is recited therein. “Travesties” is not a literal play with a beginning, middle and end, per se. Instead, it’s a wild caper of commentary about the events and character of a certain time with a slender reed of a story, which partly revolves around Carr in a disputatious relationship with Joyce before “Ulysses” is published and his genius is recognized.

In real life, Joyce did manage a production of “The Importance of Being Ernest”—to which the production gives a nod—in Zurich. Carr actually played the lead. He was paid 10 Swiss francs for his services, but was so upset by the outcome he sued Joyce for the cost of the trousers, hat and gloves he bought for the part of Algernon Montcrieff.

Clothes do play a part in the olio of a script, for Carr is ever the fop, lovingly describing in detail even what he wore in the Great War before he was sidelined with injuries. And the costumes, designed by Judith Dolan and Whitney Anne Adams, are rich and fabulous, even when they are splitting apart. And yes, some do.

The entire ensemble is dazzling. Michael Benz as the wild and silly Dadaist Tzara in a cream-colored outfit is as wild and crazy as you might imagine him. Carson Elrod as Joyce deftly rattles off limericks with Irish ease. Andrew Weems as Lenin is deliciously bombastic. And Ms. Trask as Cecily, Aloysius Gigl as Butler Bennett, Julia Motyka as Gwendolen and Isabel Keating as Nadya fill out the superb cast. Their accents are spot-on—British upper class, Irish, Russian, all with perfect elocution in demanding roles.

Dare I say it? This production, briskly directed by Gregory Boyd, is as swell as anything you’ll see on Broadway—all the more amazing because the cast had fewer than three weeks to perfect it. Mr. Boyd has a passel of awards himself and this production is proof enough that we are lucky to have him in town. The lighting by Rui Rita, the sets by Neil Patel and Caleb Levengood, the staging, the costumes, and the acting by the entire cast come together to produce an effervescent evening of madcap razzle-dazzle wordplay. Dada!

Czech/British playwright Stoppard is at his best in “Travesties,” which wowed the New York critics in 1976. However, mistake not, the play taxes the mind. Try to keep up with all the literary references and intellectual byways the script wanders through, and you’ll get a migraine. Yes, the first act can seem long; the brain can wander a bit, the air-conditioning in the theater is, as usual, set to arctic. But sit back, relax, wrap a shawl around your shoulders and stay tuned. Picking up half of the rich material Stoppard flings at you is whipped cream enough.

“Travesties” will stage on Wednesdays to Sundays, through July 20, at 8 p.m., each night, with additional stagings on Sundays and Wednesdays at 2 p.m., and Tuesdays at 7 p.m. No show Mondays. Tickets start at $60.75. For more information, call 725-9500 or visit baystreet.org.