“I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination . . . and I flung at him—’And what did you do in the Great War?’ ‘I wrote Ulysses,’ he said. ‘What did you do?’ Bloody nerve.”
And it’s all based on fact. During World War I, neutral Switzerland was a magnet for Europe’s better-quality refugees: artists and intellectuals looking for a place to carry on their investigations while the old order committed suicide. Vladimir Lenin was in Zurich during 1916 and ’17, plotting revolution. So was James Joyce, plotting Ulysses. The Romanian-born avant-gardist Tristan Tzara was there too, carrying out Dada provocations at the Cabaret Voltaire, in collusion with folks like Jean/Hans Arp and Hugo Ball.
Of course that delight carries its own negation: I’d hesitate to recommend Travesties to anybody even a little reluctant to tolerate its relentlessness, not to mention long speeches detailing the status of the arts in the dictatorship of the proletariat. There’s a distinct languor during Stoppard’s second act, when Lenin holds the floor. Interesting though Vladimir Ilyich may be as he struggles to turn his theories into politics, the passage probably felt more immediate before the fall of the USSR.
Through 5/3: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 4/8, 7:30 PM Greenhouse Theater Center 2257 N. Lincoln 773-404-7336remybumppo.org $42.50-$57.50
