Night and Day - Tom Stoppard

San Francisco
American Conservatory Theater
September 19 - October 20

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Tom Stoppard Plays 5: Arcadia, the Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood
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Tom Stoppard: A Life
(2002), Ira Bruce Nadel

Sterling Silver/Designer Meenakari Earrings
from Exotic India

    The difference is like night and day. Not coincidentally, that happens to be the title of the 1978 Tom Stoppard play at American Conservatory Theatre (ACT). And the difference between Night and Day and Stoppard’s later work such as the sublime Arcadia or the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love – or even the much earlier Jumpers is …well, I already said it.
    One wonders what possessed ACT to put this play before the public, other than artistic director Carey Perloff’s evident desire to run through the entire Stoppard canon. The theater has done splendid work in recent years with Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (also an early work) and The Invention of Love. But Night and Day is something of a sleeping dog. Better to have left it alone. One also wonders what the playwright himself, in attendance at the opening, felt, sitting in the dark watching his youthful effort stumble and sometimes fall flat on the stage before him. Did he squirm in his seat? Some of the rest of us did.
    Night and Day is a story of the difficulties faced by journalists in foreign war zones, here a set of Brits in a fictional African dictatorship, calling up long-ago visions of Idi Amin. Stoppard, himself a journalist in his early career, sets out to offer some insights into the tricks of the trade. Like, wow guys, it’s a tough gig. Politics and big business kind of sleep together and both use the press for their own ends. And the press uses them. Reporters mostly hang around hotel bars, drinking too much and looking over each other’s shoulders. A few are high-minded (particularly in the beginning) but many would sell their mothers into slavery for a scoop. And, when the action gets hot and the blood boils almost all of them will put their life on the line.
    Well duh! Tell us something we don’t already know, Tom. All this has been said and said better in films like The Year of Living Dangerously and The Killing Fields. Not to mention the nightly news. The tragic tale of Daniel Pearl still echoing in our collective nightmares, Stoppard sends in his own clowns.
    They include George Guthrie, a grizzled veteran of Viet Nam War coverage, a photographer who is, perhaps, the best of the bunch. Paul Whitworth, who plays him, certainly is the best actor on the stage. His sometime-partner, Dick Wagner (too many Richard Wagner jokes here), a smarmy Australian, needs to get the big story for the Globe and not much will stop him. ACT ensemble member Marco Barricelli plays him with a phony accent and an unsympathetic air. Although we suspect that he is the protagonist of this little drama, we really don’t much care if he gets his head blown off or not. The third member of this particular press corps is Jacob Milne (T. Edward Webster), a green free-lancer who lucks into an interview with the insurgent commander, as well as “into the knickers” of the bored wife of a local mine owner. Jacob is such a naïve weakling it's hard to care what happens to him either.
    Cherchez la femme and there's always a femme. Sex sells and Stoppard borrows his from all those old Africa films like Mogambo, Elephant Walk and King Solomon’s Mines. In case anybody doesn't get it, the heroine, Ruth (a very pretty Rene Augesen) keeps quoting from the movies in asides to the audience. She is a kind of parody of herself parodying Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and Deborah Kerr, who, in turn, are parodies of women in real life. It’s kind of a clever device the first time around but it keeps coming back again and again. Augesen does the best she can with the material but her bored sexpot remains a one-dimensional cartoon character, as does that of her husband, Geoff (Anthony Fusco), a titled mine-owner playing the dictator and the insurgents against each other to save his own assets. Fusco is properly stiff and boring in the part.
    Last among the principals is Steven Anthony Jones as President Mageeba, the volatile dictator who shows up in the wee hours of the second act to have his say and beat up one of the reporters while he’s at it. Jones is pretty scary in the role (“Can one smile and smile and still be a villain?” asked Shakespeare) and you wouldn’t want to drive around his turf on a dark night. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that the president of a country, embroiled in a civil war, would take the time to engage in a lengthy debate about freedom of the press.
    From the ranting of Mageeba and Jacob’s love song to the Fourth Estate to the real or imagined seductions of Ruth, Night and Day comes off as a B movie, presented live. There are a few laughs here and there but the best thing about it is Annie Smart’s spiffy set. And that’s not enough to spend a night or day in a theater seat.