September 24, 2006

Adam Bock, The Typographers Dream (Encore Theatre Company w/ Shotgun Players @Ashby Theater)

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Tom Stoppard, Travesties (American Conservatory Theater)

I've recently been rereading Johnn Berger's Ways of Seeing which has quite possibly framed all of my media & arts related experiences in the past couple of weeks. For example, Adam Bock's Typographer's Dream features professionals whose jobs it is to create written and visual historical records: a typographer, a geographer, and a court reporter. Each job seems innocuous, until you factor in how each of these by necessity frames the information of the products they produce, privileging (forcing) one reading over others possible: Why is Poland always pink? Once you factor in all the subjective decisions that these professionals make and couple that with a Benjaminian understanding of reproduction, suspicion begins to fall on everything claiming to be a record of something else. Enter Stoppard's Henry Carr, a mid-level diplomat in Zurich during the Great World War. Wheelchair bound and elderly, Carr begins to spin a yarn that puts him near the center of Zurich's incredible avant-garde and revolutionary activity, placing Tristan Tzara, James Joyce and Vladimir Lenin all just one degree of separation from each other. The problem is that Carr's failing memory and his propensity for self-aggrandizement aren't to be relied upon. Could he have really stopped Lenin from catching the train to Russia after the revolution if only he hadn't fallen in love with a reference librarian? What ensues is a multi-perspective discussion of art and revolution and the value and purpose of both. Is Tzara another product of lickspittle imperialism? Joyce another bourgeois in pauper's mismatched clothing? Lenin doesn't get Mayakovsky? Really? Really really?