An Exquisite Off-Broadway Reinvention Retains Stoppard’s Spirit

For all of Tom Stoppard’s blazing wit and erudition, what ultimately made him one of our greatest playwrights was the true mark of any great artist — the emotional resonance of his work. Those who dismiss his plays as too clever or cerebral are as wrong as they would be, and often are, leveling the same accusation against Stephen Sondheim. Both creative giants fed our hearts and souls as much as our minds, for decades. Stoppard, who left us only last year, also found something of a fellow spirit in the classical scholar and poet A.E. Housman, the subject of his 1997 play “The Invention of Love.” Best known for his textual criticism of Latin and Greek verse, Housman is depicted in “Invention” as a man of furious intellectual curiosity and equally intense yearning, and since he was gay, and came of age and influence during the Victorian Era, the latter put him at considerable risk.When it was produced on Broadway 25 years ago, “Invention” earned Tony Awards for both Richard Easton, who played AEH, as the older Housman is referred to in the script, at the end of his life, making his journey across the River Styx — the path to the underworld, in Greek mythology — and Robert Sean Leonard, who portrayed him as a young man studying at Oxford and beginning to forge a literary career, all the while harboring unrequited passion for a fellow student.In The MAP Theater’s intimate, radiant new production of “Invention,” now being presented off-Broadway at Theaterlab, AEH is played by David Greenspan, an actor and playwright who has won wide acclaim and a bevy of Obie Awards for his experimental work in both capacities, which includes a number of solo pieces.Under Zachary Elkind’s brisk, fervent direction, Mr. Greenspan mines the play’s wit and fire, and its tenderness, with predictable authority. “I’m dead, then. Good,” AEH announces at the beginning, facing the ferryman tasked with taking him to the other side — played as a droll cockney by Annabel Capper, who like many of the actors juggles different roles. The ferry itself is represented by a simple, rowboat-like structure that becomes the centerpiece of Bridget Lindsay’s spare scenic design, even functioning at one point as a theater.David Greenspan in ‘The Invention of Love.’ Via Paul LutvakWe first meet the young Housman in another boat with two college buddies, both drawn, like most of these characters, from real life: Alfred Pollard, presented by a winning Daniel Liu as a dry, deft wiseacre, and Moses Jackson, the man who captured and broke Housman’s heart. “I would have died for you,” AEH says several times throughout the play, “but I never had the luck!”Jackson, notably, is at Oxford on a science scholarship; the character, athletic and playful, teases his friends about the relative frivolousness of art, though when he uses the term “aesthete,” it has other, darker connotations. José Espinosa, a strapping and elegant presence, brings the right physical charisma to the role, and the proper nuance; Stoppard plainly didn’t intend him to be a jerk.But the real revelation of this staging, at least for anyone who hasn’t seen him before, is Yaron Lotan, the rising actor cast as Housman. In a portrait as lovable as it is eventually wrenching, Mr. Lotan relays the young protagonist’s brilliance, his awkwardness, and his despair with such seeming effortlessness that I suspect even an ogre would feel for him.A posse of comically judgmental professors and critics who waddle around like penguins — with Alyssa Korol’s black and white costumes underlining the similarity — are played by performers who later appear as journalists and a Member of Parliament, whose own often snide opinions and projections reflect a growing danger for men who share Housman’s sexual orientation. One cast member, the excellent Sam Bolen, also turns up as one of their more famous victims, Oscar Wilde.Towards the end of the play, AEH converses with Wilde, and the latter muses, “The artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. You are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none.”In this lovely, stirring production, “The Invention of Love” reminds us we need both.

An Exquisite Off-Broadway Reinvention Retains Stoppard’s Spirit

An Exquisite Off-Broadway Reinvention Retains Stoppard’s Spirit

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