“A Stoppard Duo” is the first production in Stone Soup Theatre's attractive, intimate new theater. This company is dedicated to the one-act play and they could hardly do better than to produce the dazzling wordplay and theatrical inventiveness of Tom Stoppard. In the brightly funny “After Magritte” the combination of surrealist imagery and a preposterous criminal mystery requires the players to create a self-deluded reality in which they are both the active agents and the passive victims. With “The Fifteen Minute Hamlet” we have a travesty (especially in this cross-gender casting) which relates the familiar drama with a maximum of frantic action and a minimum of dramatic sobriety. While Stoppard is always worth seeing, this production had decidedly mixed results, not within the two shows but between the two.
“After Magritte” opens with an older woman lying on an ironing board, a man in hip-waders changing a lightbulb and a woman in a prom dress crawling across the floor. They are ballroom dancers and their first problem is in fixing the hanging lamp which is counterbalanced by a basket of fruit. The old woman plays the tuba. They decide they need a fireman and a police inspector arrives, questioning them about a crime which may (but probably does not) have some tangential relationship to a man they saw outside the Tate gallery, where an exhibition of the work of Rene Magritte was on display. Many things are said, most of which have no causal or narrative relationship to the events in question.
As in all Stoppard (this play is from 1970) the real subject of this play is the infinitely clever and brilliantly resourceful mind of the playwright. Director Mary Machala has kept tight control on her effective cast, keeping each line clearly delivered and the action perfectly balanced, so that we are required to weight the significance of each event for ourselves. That personalized valuation of random detail is, of course, precisely what surrealism does with objects and images. Courtney Bohls was particularly effective as Thelma Harris, keeping her dignity balanced with the desire to find something rational in the midst of the arbitrary. Her husband Reginald was also well-performed by Matthew Middleton, although not quite as controlled. The officious and self-important Inspector Foot was nicely devised by Aaron Ousley. The older woman (Chris Hille) and the PC Holmes (Michael LoSasso) were both effective supporting roles.
Most importantly, this production understood that the script requires enormous restraint and self-containment to keep its diverse and ridiculous elements bonded. The absurdity is in the text, in the theatrical conception. It does not require “performance” to be funny or entertaining, just delivery. Director Mary Machala got that dead right.
That, unfortunately, is exactly what Director Roger Tompkins got completely wrong in “The Fifteen Minute Hamlet.” This sketch not only encapsulates the action of the play by simply delivering great lines, not necessarily in order, but by playing the whole thing as an almost vaudeville-style prop comedy, with characters primarily defined by costume pieces and broad action. It does it with enormous speed, of course, and as an added attraction the play is repeated for two encores at an even more frenetic pace. This notion, of course, was perfected by the Reduced Shakespeare Company and expanded to include a very brief “History of the World” and so forth. It's funny, but only if the performance is disciplined and precisely delivered. This appearance of comedy as a result of chaos only works if it is performed with expertise, and the attitude one of serious intention. The alternative is what we have here; it is a painfully desperate exercise in mugging, in pushing way too hard to make us think this is all much more madcap and hilarious than it really is. The players may be having fun, but we're not. Of this large cast (for a small space) only Kat Schroeder as Hamlet had the right sense of really trying to make this all successful, of sincerely attempting to get it right and, as a direct result, making it really funny. The rest were sadly just sound and fury signifying nothing.
Stone Soup Theatre has a great mission in trying to present the one-act as a main course and their playing space is very appealing. This production may have only been half-successful, but the half that worked was entertaining and accomplished. I look forward to more good work from this company.
