"The Real Thing" at Aurora Theatre Company

Aurora photo by David Allen

If you've been following this blog or my other theater commentary at all, you probably know of my fondness for Tom Stoppard's work. "The Real Thing" was, I think, the second Stoppard play I ever saw, and I have seen something like four different productions of it. It's a popular play because it features lots of good, witty language and more emotional content that one often finds in Stoppard. I chose the photo above because it's of one of my favorite, most memorable scenes, where Henry, the playwright, uses the analogy of a cricket bat to explain why good writing is actually good, not just because someone says it is. I also picked it because you can see both Nina Ball's set and some of Kurt Landisman's lighting, which both add a lot to the show.

Anyway, it's always fun to revisit a familiar play, though this time in a rather different staging. The production has been popular, and is extended through March 5th, so you still have time to catch it. (And, spoiler: it's worth seeing!)

The Play

Tom Stoppard is well-known as a clever and intellectual writer, but gets criticism for being a bit emotionally distant. He's thought to be more comfortable writing about ideas than about feelings. And that's probably true. In "The Real Thing," however, he tackles that head-on with a play that is not only about love and marriage and infidelity (and writing and theater and...), but also cuts fairly close to Stoppard's own reality in several ways. Though you can still question the emotional content of the writing, there is no doubt there is reality impacting on it.

Through the course of the play we see Henry (Elijah Alexander, above with the cricket bat) and his first wife, Charlotte (Carrie Paff), then his second wife, Annie (Liz Sklar), who he leaves Charlotte for. It's much more complicated when you add Annie's first husband, Max (Seann Gallagher) and Henry and Charlotte's daughter, Debbie. Throw in a young political prisoner with literary aspirations and a randy young actor and you have plenty of possibilities.

Stoppard makes good use of the revolving doors of relationships, both real and theatrical, to keep the audience on their toes. Add a musical score of popular music from the 1950s and 1960s, and those toes keep tapping throughout. I remember vividly the first production I saw of this play, at Marin Theater Company, and thought how marvelously they had woven the music into it. Only later, when reading the script, did I learn that Stoppard includes the musical cues right in the script, down to specific songs and artists.

I have to say that sound designer Cliff Caruthers has gone beyond even that and woven the music even more deeply into the fabric of the play, as well as providing a complementary soundtrack before, between, and after the acts. It's kind of like living in an old jukebox, which I loved!

The Production

As noted earlier, the set, lights, and sound are all top-notch. Of particular interest to me is the fact that this is the first time I've seen the play staged in such an intimate setting. The three-quarter thrust stage that is Aurora's little home puts one right in the laps of the players, and also requires them to be a bit more active than in a traditional staging. The closeness to the characters is engrossing, though I have to admit it was sometimes a little distracting to see audience members behind the characters. But overall, I loved the staging.

The lead actors are also terrific. Alexander I'd seen at Ashland and CalShakes, Paff is a regular at SF Playhouse and other local thaters, and Sklar seems to be everywhere I turn locally this year, between "Anne Boleyn" at Marin and "Othello" at CalShakes. Tommy Gorrebeeck as Billy and Brodie is also locally familiar. Together, they keep the action moving and believable, which can be tricky amidst the complexity and wit of Stoppard's words.

I was also glad to see that neither the cast nor directory Timothy Near seemed tempted to try to bring the play to a clear conclusion. There are definitely some leanings, but Stoppard doesn't really have a clear closing message he insists you take away. If anything, he seems intent on presenting some moral and practical ambiguities and letting us play with the possibilities in our own heads. That's the fun of a play like this, anyway.

Overall

There are some elements of the play that are definitely showing their age. It is, after all, 35 years old. So it has to serve on some level as a period piece, and modern audiences might have some issues with some of Stoppard's (and Henry's) choices in the text. At the same time, there are some truly timeless issues of human emotion and attachment that it touches on, and it would be unfortunate to throw those out just because some of the rest is uncomfortable. [I'm put in mind here of Shotgun's production of Aphra Behn's "The Rover" last year, which is wildly uncomfortable in many ways, yet an important work because of how it portrayed relationships between men and women 400 years ago.] There are probably some artistic choices that future productions will choose to make, either edits or changes in emphasis, that will adjust parts of this play to make them more palatable to modern audiences. In the mean time, we get 1982 Tom Stoppard writing about a male writer's mid-life crises, and whatever else it is, the writing is fun.

I have to say this is a much better production of "The Real Thing" than the one I saw in New York a couple of years ago. That one had bigger names in the starring roles, but in a bigger theater, it didn't really matter who it was, and the staging was not nearly as engaging. This is definitely a unique opportunity to see a deeply personal Tom Stoppard play in a setting that brings out the human connections in a way that you can almost reach out and touch them. That alone is enough reason to go.

Check it out.