TT: The guillotine of history

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a new off-Broadway play, John Guare’s 3 Kinds of Exile, and two out-of-town revivals, Present Laughter in Red Bank, New Jersey, and The Real Thing in Washington, D.C. Here’s an excerpt.
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The twin tyrannies of Communism and Nazism killed so many Europeans that it’s temptingly easy to think only of the mountains of corpses that were their monument. But totalitarianism also did damage to countless other people by forcing them into unsought exile. Some who fled to America and elsewhere were able to start anew, but many others soon found that the guillotine of history had cut their lives in two. In “3 Kinds of Exile,” John Guare dramatizes the sufferings of a trio of European émigrés whose existence was turned inside out when they left home….
Mr. Guare, as is his wont, tells these varied tales with surging energy and an infectious sense of the absurd, and the three parts of “3 Kinds of Exile” add up to an “entertainment” that is at once excitingly lively and unsettlingly macabre….
Michael Cumpsty was born to play Garry Essendine, the self-absorbed anti-hero of “Present Laughter,” Noël Coward’s comedy about a flamboyant matinée idol who bears a far-more-than-coincidental resemblance to the author himself. Mr. Cumpsty, the star of Two River Theater Company’s new production of Coward’s best play, knows that Essendine is at bottom a spoiled child who is scared of the dark, and he combines stiletto-sharp wit with high-camp poutiness to endlessly exhilarating effect. His performance would be worth seeing all by itself…
Studio Theatre has a strong track record with the plays of Tom Stoppard, and the company’s in-the-round revival of “The Real Thing,” Stoppard’s most heartfelt play, is for the most part a sound piece of work. Annie Purcell, who plays the woman who teaches Henry (Teagle F. Bougere), Stoppard’s own fictional alter ego, a painful lesson in the meaning of love, gives a really lovely performance, sincere and winsome in just the right proportions, and Caroline Bootle Pendergast is pointed and ironic as Charlotte, Henry’s first wife and the mother of his only child (very well played by Barrett Doss). Mr. Bougere, alas, is the weak link, not because he isn’t a good actor but because he lacks the lightness of touch necessary to bring Henry to convincing life….
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Read the whole thing here.