Through Sept. 19.
The bulk of the 1972 Tom Stoppard play Jumpers is taken up by the meandering dictations of a latter-day George Moore (David Pichette), who like his philosopher namesake is a professor at a British university. George is attempting to write a paper for a symposium entitled "Man: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?" and he is failing utterly. Not that the audience is supposed to notice. We're supposed to be swept up in a pseudo-intellectual tizzy, remarking new ideas here (the question "Does God exist?" presupposes God as a subject? You don't say!) and recognizing familiar themes there (ah, the good old problem of altruism--I know it like I know the sum total of my tax-deductible expenditures in the last fiscal year).
Which is to say, the majority of the decent production of Jumpers at ACT Theatre is given over to tedium. We watch an ostensible professor of philosophy ponder Zeno's intractably abstract paradox (where one object keeps closing half the distance between it and another object without ever catching up) by literally acting out the scenario. Chuckle as David Pichette clutches a waxy turtle and chases a missing hare. Smile indulgently as he sets up for a quick game of indoor archery, which is all fun and infinitesimals until an animal gets its eye poked out. It's not altogether difficult to imagine that the goofy monologues at the heart of the play were written by a college freshman stoned out of his mind after the first lecture in Introduction to Western Thought.
David Pichette is entrusted with the unenviable task of making all this muck go down smoothly, and convincing us that his character is cleverer than he first appears. Against all odds, he succeeds. Poor endearing George, I consoled myself silently as he babbled on about the scourge of moral relativism. You've been hijacked by a punning fool, but you'll get your brains back once the curtain goes down.
If half an hour of George's half-baked philosophy sent me for a bit of a loop, you can imagine how his poor wife feels. Dorothy (Erika Rolfsrud), a former romantic chanteuse, has turned Dotty in more ways than one after a historic moon landing gone tragically wrong. She's moonstruck, positively loony, and a bit of a hysteric to boot. Dotty can't imagine how one could possibly croon love songs about the chalky satellite after it has been the site of a Darwinian homicide. By proving herself literally minded in a play so self-importantly inclined to verbal flexibility, she earns her punishment: being cooped up in a shiny pink-and-lavender boudoir (rendered in all its gaudy splendor by scenic designer Matthew Smucker). Erika Rolfsrud is, if anything, too committed to her character as written; a bit smudged around the edges, her Dotty is all feminine slop and no charisma.
This domestic drama between the mismatched spouses is merely the center of a busy plot involving George's dapper colleague, Archie Jumper (the excellent R. Hamilton Wright), and his troupe of faculty acrobats (the titular, yellow-spandexed Jumpers). The play's imagined future is not our own, and so Archie's moral relativism is threatening and somehow tied up with a quasi-fascistic political party called the Radical Liberals. (Though context is hardly the same, the line that got the biggest laugh from the audience was "It's not the voting that's democracy; It's the counting.") During the play's best scene, a raucous election celebration at George and Dotty's house, a display involving a number of aerial cartwheels, a few back handsprings, and one notable back layout is cut short by a gunshot. The resulting corpse and the halfhearted mystery surrounding the murder are the subject of many amusing situations as the play unfolds.
But isn't there something deeply cynical about bribing audiences with striptease and primary colors and gymnastics in a play about philosophy? Do we need to see George's poor secretary cavorting naked on a swing before we'll consent to watching her sitting mute on stage for the rest of the evening? Do we really require a cheerleading pyramid to gird us for the ponderous philosophizing to come? The answer to each of these questions is yes. Audiences are too dumb and too smart and too depressingly middle-of-the-road. Together, they are impossible to please. But acrobatics don't hurt.
