Jumpers

— by Tom Stoppard.

It’s an exhilarating and challenging and moving play. Hard to describe, a bit unclassifiable – at times, unbeLIEVably goofy – I was laughing out loud in the balcony (trying not to let the laughs turn into hacking whooping coughs, which was a struggle).

There is an insane beginning, with a live jazz band, and a female trapeze artist swinging back and forth across the stage … and a full musical number, with a Marilyn Monroe-esque nightclub singer, and these RIDICULOUS acrobats – all men, dressed in yellow sweat suits, and yellow headbands. These guys were HILARIOUS. They were obviously good tumblers, but the routines they were given looked like 3rd grade tumbling class … So funny. These guys came in and out of the play, at odd moments.

True comic relief.

But then there are the lead characters – a professor in “moral philosophy” and his ex-nightclub-singer wife who is depressive and bed-ridden and sex-pottish and has stopped sleeping with him – for mysterious reasons. (It’s an awesome part – a part I could play beautifully. It made me sad. Made me feel very far away from anything even remotely resembling success.) But still: a GREAT female part. She’s funny and bizarre and sexy and tragic and smart. She had been one of his philosophy students, and they had married.

The philosopher leads the play, dominates every scene, with a flood of words. He is preparing to give a talk at a symposium that evening, and he is preparing. The entire play is talk-talk-talk … Not everything said has equal importance, and once I realized that, I relaxed a bit. I realized: “Oh, every single word is not the most important thing … This is just how the man talks … He’s like that guy in love with his own thought processes at a dinner party …”

He was FABULOUS. Just FABULOUS.

I am yearning to buy the actual script, so I can study it – and see that flood of words, flat on the page – It is amazing how he was able to lift it off the flat page, and make it live.

What was also so HEARTENING, so ENCOURAGING – is that Jumpers – like Arcadia – like most of Stoppard’s work – appeals on multiple levels. And one level is the level of the intellect. It challenges you intellectually. Lots of plays leave that level out. They go for the gut, or they go to make a social statement in a broad-brushed way – or they just go for your funny bone. Which, damn, there’s nothing wrong with that!!

But Stoppard always has this other level going on – the level of “ideas”. Not too many people write “idea plays” anymore. Michael Frayn does, brilliantly. There are a couple of others. You come out of Stoppard’s plays and talk about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or Descartes … You decide: “Hm. I must Google Wittgenstein’s theory on blah blah blah…”

And what was heartening about all of this is that – the play isn’t done in an alienating or snobbish way. You must keep up with it, it has some difficult ideas, the man talks a mile a minute, leaping about, interrupting himself …

But what I felt all around me was an entire Broadway audience, leaning forward in its seats.

What was also beautiful is that although it is a huge Broadway house, there were times when it felt like a small theatre, and it felt like we were a small audience. Everyone was listening to this man’s words – and everyone was picking up on different things. The philosopher would say something, make some observation, and once I heard one random man up front GUFFAW – He clearly had gotten something. There was a black woman sitting in front of me, who was hunched forward in her chair, just BURSTING out laughing in recognition at random statements – random observations made. Everyone seemed to be having very personal experiences. The whole night was like that.

And there are elements of the play which are phenomenally goofy and reminded me of Cary Grant in Bringing up Baby – or any of those screwball comedies. There were a couple of extended gags involving philosophers as acrobats – which were so STUPID and so FUNNY. I loved the whimsy of it.

I loved the play for its big-ness, and also for its mystery. Its ambiguities. None of the ambiguity was there just to be cool or avant-garde. No. It was there because it fit.

Ted and I emerged into the night and walked down 8th Avenue talking a mile a minute. About the IDEAS in the play.

That, to me, is just a feast for the soul. The kind of theatre I love to see. Theatre that is not pedantic, or propaganda – theatre that is not trying to tell you how to feel – but something that wants to involve the audience, get the audience to participate, get the audience to have “A-ha” moments.

That’s what Jumpers was like for me.

I remember a guy I was dating a couple years ago took me to see Brian Dennehy in Death of a Salesman. I know that play by heart and have seen it 5, 642 times. But not with Dennehy. But my date, while he had read the play, had never actually seen it done. So we were both excited.

Personally, I thought Dennehy sucked.

But that’s not the point. The point is: after the show, my date and I went out and he started talking to me about his father. It happened quite naturally. Suddenly, there we were, at a cafe, and he was telling me about the sadness he saw come over his father’s face from time to time, how he wondered what it was like sometimes in his father’s head …

And I remember thinking:

“Jesus. Conversations like this are why that play is so great. Are why any great play is great.”

We didn’t go out after the play and talk about the PLAY. We went out after the play and talked about OURSELVES.