One recent evening, I attended a rehearsal for Burning Coal Theatre’s new production of Travesties, a play by the cerebral playwright Tom Stoppard. In the Raleigh warehouse where the cast rehearsed, a spare domestic scene was arranged: Two green armchairs, a tea set, a black bowling hat perched on a mantle.
Something about the scene brought to mind artwork that I couldn’t quite place—I wrote down “melting clock painting?” in my notes—though as the teatime guests trickled in, surrealist allusions snapped into place: James Joyce was there, as was the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, and a handful of other important-looking people.
This month, Triangle audiences get Stoppard’s headiness in back-to-back succession, with the Burning Coal production of Travesties (October 8-25) followed by a Raleigh Little Theatre production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (October 23-November 8).
It’s a big year for both companies. Professional theater company Burning Coal launches its thirtieth season with Travesties; Raleigh Little Theatre, a volunteer-run community theater, is celebrating its ninetieth anniversary. And while it’s not common for regional theater companies to put on back-to-back shows by the same playwright, these productions follow Stoppard’s death last year, at age 88, offering audiences a dual opportunity to honor the Czech-born British playwright.
“I really love Stoppard’s work. I think he’s just a genius,” said Steven Roten, who plays a British consular named Henry Carr in Travesties. “At a level of normal commercial theater around here, we don’t get to work on plays like that—I was excited by that opportunity.”
Stoppard is known for writing hyper-literary plays that project plot through a kind of funhouse mirror—blurring fiction and history, past and present—and which are, it has to be said, a little hard to explain. Travesties is no exception. A fictional version of a real historical confluence, the play takes place during WWI in Zurich, Switzerland, where several burgeoning intellectuals—Joyce (Ryan Pater), Tzara (John Jimerson), Vladimir Lenin (Vuitton Bond)—have sought refuge from the war.
While there, a young Joyce stages a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, casting Carr (Steven Roten) as a lead; fallout between the two men ensues. Stoppard structures his play with alternating timelines, going between an elderly Carr in the 1970s, reflecting back, and a 1917-era Zurich in geopolitical limbo.
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How to translate such a brainy plot to stage? For Travesties director Flora Bare, the answer lay in leaning into the text’s playfulness.
“As soon as we got the actors in the room, it came to life,” said Bare, whose background, as both an actor and director, is quite physical—alongside a pedigreed list of teaching credentials, she has a gymnastics background and extensive clown training.
“My directing style is leaning into the impulses of the actors, trying to give them a lot of freedom to play,” she continued. “When I have actors that are excited about that physical play—and you know, throw their hat off and just go for it—then it gives me a lot of material to essentially curate and go and block and say, ‘Yes, more of that.’ I so rarely have to pull actors back. And actually, with this group, sometimes I’m like, ‘Woohoo! I had to pull you back.’”
This excitement was evident in the scene I watched at the rehearsal: Roten nimbly swings between the young and elderly versions of Carr, and Jimerson (who looks a good bit like Ewan McGregor) is endearing as an eccentric poet. Pater, who also has a background as a clown, offers an impressive command of an Irish accent. Jenn Suchanec, who plays a coquettish character named Cecily, is limber and funny.
Director Jerri Lynn Schulke is likewise leaning into Stoppard’s moments of levity with her direction of Raleigh Little Theatre’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
“[Stoppard] can be a little bit heady, but he knew that—I think that’s why he kind of balanced it,” said Schulke, adding that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was Stoppard’s first play, written when he was in his late twenties, and has an inherent youthful playfulness to its text.
“I love the surrealistic quality of it, and I love the whole idea of the looping, the repetition. They’re stuck, and there’s no exit, technically, for them. So how do I create that?”
sonya drum, set designer
Like Travesties, this play has a pretty meta plot, though its title offers a helpful starting point: Rosencrantz (Parker Perry) and Guildenstern (Gabriel Krut), two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are dead but don’t know it.
Caught in a tragicomic twilight zone, they wander in and out of Hamlet’s actual plot, fumbling through discussions about philosophy and the nature of fate. Throughout the play, the two men toss a coin that continually lands on its head—a gag that tips them off to the fact that perhaps they are dead, having been written in Hamlet to die.
Set designer Sonya Drum said she was excited about the existential nature of the play, which has always been a “bucket list” item for her.
“I love the surrealistic quality of it, and I love the whole idea of the looping, the repetition,” said Drum, a public school art teacher. “They’re stuck, and there’s no exit, technically, for them. So how do I create that?”
To transmit that sense of repetition, she drew inspiration from artists who played with spatial reality—M.C. Escher’s brain-twisting worlds of staircases, Giorgio de Chirico’s infinite archways, and René Magritte’s unsettling everyday objects.
Burning Coals’ production of Travesties also draws on surrealism, facilitated by its structure as a memory play.
“A lot is in [Carr’s] memory, so it’s not naturalistic. Many moments of the play are going to have very cool lighting and surreal moments of going, ‘Are we in a dream? Are we in reality?’ And then it pops right back into reality,” said Bare.
With the production, audiences can expect a good deal of physical humor to ground those moments: actors hop on chairs, perform aerial arts, and a rabbit is produced out of a hat. (Later, the image I was trying to recall surfaces: the Magritte painting of a man in a bowler hat with a green-apple face.)
As to whether audiences can come into one of these plays cold, without much background on Stoppard (or WWI, or Dadaism, or Shakespeare), Bare isn’t worried—after all, optical illusions are best seen rather than described.
“It’s a lot more heartfelt than reading it on a piece of paper,” she said. “If anybody tried to read Tom Stoppard and felt intimidated by it on the page, come see it.”
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