You know you have ticked off one more rite of passage when, while visiting a distant city, you don’t seek to know the hot radio station, but the local real estate prices. Similarly, I think, you reach a point where you attend a movie or a play, especially if you’re in the business, even on the fringes of it, and say not merely, “I don’t like this,” but “is there an audience for this?”

Is there an audience – an American audience -- for Tom Stoppard’s “Rock’n’Roll”? I saw it on Broadway last week. I had been waiting for it to come to Broadway since I learned that it had been staged in London. I considered myself a huge Stoppard fan, but I see now that I was only halfway there, the R & G Are Dead, The Real Thing, Shakespeare in Love, The Invention of Love, Jumpers half, and not the Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Coast of Utopia half.

In general, I’m not a political animal. I’m not opposed to political theater, as long as it is actual drama about actual people. And yes I knew that “Rock’n’Roll” was about the Prague Spring and felt that I had all the education I needed to have in order to attend the play. I had been to Prague. I had toured the sites of its tragedies (and, other than beautiful architecture, free music and cheap beer, its tragic past is one of its selling points.) I had even done the requisite homework as requested by the little slip of paper that came with my tickets. (Not the kind of thing that happens, I imagine, when you buy tickets to “Legally Blonde.”)

Rock’n’Roll spans two decades, and begins in August 1968 when the Soviet Tanks rolled down Wenceslas Square and put an end to the experiment in political liberalization that then Czech-leader Dubczek had been testing out for a whole 8 months. Jan, a Czech student played by Rufus Sewell hightails it out of Cambridge to go back home to “save socialism … and my mother,” armed only with his vinyl LPs of the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. His professor, played by Brian Cox, protests with rhetoric. Back and forth for 20 years. Jan suffers real privations, Brian Cox suffers loss of idealism, the Berlin Wall comes down, the Stones play Prague, the end.

Not that there aren’t some terribly moving moments in the play, not that Rufus Sewell doesn’t deliver a character who wears his increasing years of experience and heartache with tender poignancy, not that I wasn’t glad as hell to hear Pink Floyd blasted on a Broadway stage (“I feel old,” muttered the man behind me.) But I just wasn’t engaged. The Brian Cox character, the idealistic Marxist professor -- ok, you lost me at “idealistic Marxist” -- not in the 80’s, pal, not when we knew.

Well, I know, it’s only Tom Stoppard, but I loved him. “Don’t you love him?” I asked a woman at the bar before the show started. A Brit in a decisive hat, she shook her head abruptly and drained her drink as the bells rang, calling us to our seats. “You don’t?” I pressed on, feeling as slighted as a soccer mom. (I had chosen her, by the way, at random.) “He has the autodidact’s need to always show how smart he is,” she sniffed.

You doubt me. Well, I rearranged the words slightly, but she definitely used the term “autodidact” because while she groped for it, so did I – oh, yeah, what’s that word that means self-educated, and why is it so hostile-sounding?

So maybe “Rock’n’Roll” is part of an autodidact’s agitprop education but as for me, sentimental capitalist, I was hoping for the moment of shivering recognition I felt while watching “The Invention of Love” when Robert Sean Leonard (may his tribe increase!) playing A.E. Houseman, confessed his love to the (straight) college colleague who proved to be the love of his life, “Did you really never know?”

That play had the same erudition, autodidactism, idealism – hell, that one came with a 30 page booklet instead of a link to website homework, but at the bottom of it was the beat of human need. ‘Cause that’s really what rock’n’roll is – not a rebel voice that threatens Authority, but the very pulse that keeps you free.

Labels: agitprop theater, Brian Cox, Broadway, Broadway audience, Prague, Prague Spring, Robert Sean Leonard, Rock'n'Roll, Rufus Sewell, socialism, The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard

posted by Elizabeth at 6:46 PM