‘Rock ’n’ Roll’ provocative but lacks passion

Communism meets classic rock against the grim, totalitarian backdrop of 1970s Czechoslovakia. If you’re at all like me and you love rock music and history, that kind of theatrical premise has you literally salivating. Unfortunately, muted lead performances and an overall lack of dynamism prevent Theatre Intime’s production of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” from fully living up to the strength of its setup.

The play follows Max (Joseph Labatt ’14), a radical Marxist and Cambridge professor, and Jan (Michael Pinsky ’15), a Czech rock-and-roll enthusiast and political dissident, through the 1970s and ’80s until the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia in 1990. The majority of the onstage action takes place between two or three characters in static situations — sitting around Jan’s apartment listening to records or at a table in Max’s home in Cambridge — which means that the show’s dramatic heart lies in Stoppard’s brilliant, intensely political dialogue.

This, however, is where the production starts to run into trouble. “Rock ’n’ Roll” falls short in its treatment of radical politics. Labatt and Pinsky’s energy levels seem weirdly out of step with the ideological passions animating their lines, and their scenes lack any sense of urgency or vitality not directly written into the dialogue. Despite his character’s progressively dissident political views and roiling emotions, the convincingly Slavic-looking Pinsky appears to be drawing his performance from the understated, monotone-prone “Clerks” school of acting. In a similar vein, Labatt’s physicality and voice are only believably zealous when his Marxist monologues reach feverish crescendos — something that happens all too rarely.

Fortunately, Phil Rosen ’14 gives a highly compelling portrayal of Ferdinand, Jan’s friend and fellow dissident, and his politically motivated scenes with Jan are refreshingly urgent and full of life.

In fact, the production gets almost all of its energy from smaller characters and their struggles outside of Marxism. Sarah Paton ’13 portrays Eleanor, Max’s cancer-stricken wife, with a heart-wrenching level of complexity and emotion. Her dramatic fight with Labatt is without question the production’s high point. Labatt also performs well here, displaying good emotional range. Other stand-out performances include Lindsey Rose Aguero-Sinclair ’13 as a wonderfully spacey, new-age Czech philology student and Juliet Garrett ’15 as Max’s easily exasperated teenage granddaughter. Still, these short bursts of liveliness are not enough to sustain the momentum of the show for its entire two-and-a-half hour duration; a large group of older audience members seated next to me left at intermission.

The blocking by director Julia Bumke ’13 by and large feels natural, and her decision to physically split the stage between scenes in Czechoslovakia and Cambridge — as opposed to having a constant flow of lengthy set changes — is a good one. Technically speaking, the set design is solid, but the play’s most successful technical element, however, is a trick for indicating the time and place of each scene: The words “Prague” and “Cambridge” are written on walls on both sides of the stage, along with every year during which a scene takes place in that location. In the transition time between scenes, both the location and the year of the scene about to take place are spotlighted. This is helpful in clarifying the play’s shifts and eliminates the audience’s need to refer to the program in order to orient themselves in the production’s time and place.

Due to the strength of the technical elements, the overall production ends up feeling cohesive; but from a theatrical perspective, it is still uneven. It’s a lot to ask of an audience to sit through two-and-a-half hours of dense, often philosophical dialogue without a tangible sense that the characters speaking are truly passionate about and animated by their convictions and beliefs. (To Bumke’s credit, however, a helpful “cheat sheet” of important geopolitical events discussed in the show is provided in the program to prevent confusion). The show really hits its stride when its lively cast of smaller characters is engaged and when politics take a back seat to family, romance and rock ’n’ roll.