July 18-21, 2024
Tom Stoppard’s Comedy about Art, Revolutionaries, Libraries, and Cucumber Sandwiches wows audiences with its riff on those who create art and those create social change. “The year is 1916, the place is neutral Switzerland, and the world is unhinged…”
Performance Times and Location
July 18-20 @ 7:30 p.m.
July 21 @ 2:00 p.m.
Welsbacher Theatre
WSU Metropolitan Complex
Door F (northeast side of building)
What to Expect
TRAVESTIES is a comic whirlwind generated when novelist James Joyce, surrealist Tristan Tzara, and the political revolutionary Lenin walk into a bar… cross paths in the Zurich Library in 1916. Inspired by the True Story of how civil servant Henry Carr later came to sue James Joyce over the price of a pair of pants worn in a production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. (Yes, this craziness really happened. We promise.)
At the height of Modernism (1890-1930), artists were struggling to come to terms with upheavals in human society, amid sweeping changes in the modernization of thought, of politics, of economics and indeed of every facet of daily life. As we enter a post-industrial, digitized meta-modern age, Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play has never been more relevant.
Cast
Coleman Adams
James Joyce
Bronwen Burch
Nadya
James Earlywine
Tristin Tzara
Matthew Gwinner
Henry Carr
Jill Herbert
Cecily
Holland Lee Kiser
Gwendolen
Jo Smith
Vladimir Lenin
Megan Upton-Tyner
Bennett
Creatives
Sydney Alder
Intimacy Director
Dr. Julie Longhofer
Director and Scenic & Costume Design
Kirk Longhofer
Sound Design
Stan Longhofer
Lighting Design and Technical Direction
Gretchen Otter
Production Stage Manager
Director’s Notes
About a year ago, I was reading Hermione Lee’s biography of playwright Tom Stoppard and the chapter on his 1974 screwball comedy TRAVESTIES caught my attention. Many directors base their play selection on plays which they like — well, I like hundreds of plays, so I tend to keep my radar attuned for a constellation of actors who can be successful in one of the pieces I love. To produce TRAVESTIES, one must have a character actor capable of great depth in serious moments but possessed of natural comedic flair (Henry Carr); he must also be able to memorize 5-page monologues and hold an audience’s attention for said monologue. The play also requires an out-of-the-box thinker who is intelligent but connects quickly with an audience (Tzara), an actor who can easily speak the Russian language (Lenin) and an actor whose brain and linguistic aptitude allows him to portray the inimitable writer James Joyce. While the other characters in TRAVESTIES are delightfully challenging, it is the constellation of Matthew Gwinner, James Earlywine, Jo Smith and Cole Adams which convinced me I could pull off a production of this extraordinary comedy.
What is TRAVESTIES about? It is about a Nobody who is also Everybody named Henry Carr, a real historical figure who remembers his time in Zurich in 1917 when he may or may not have enjoyed the company of geniuses, revolutionaries and artists during the watershed event known as the war to end wars. (Spoiler: World War 1 did not end all wars.) Much that you see tonight never actually happened, but all of it is true — especially the fact that “if you can’t be a revolutionary, you might as well be an artist.”
