Theater: Trick and Treat

EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOR by Tom Stoppard Music by Andre Previn

If Tom Stoppard were not a playwright, he would probably be a magician—or a card shark. He delights in illusions and confusions, puns and verbal crostics, taking away with his left hand what he has just given with his right. In Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, at Washington's Kennedy Center, he has taken his art to its immediate limit: the play itself is a trick.

Actually, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor is not merely a play, but a play for actors and orchestra, and therein lies the trick. One of the two main characters, the mad Ivanov (John Wood), believes that he owns an orchestra, and is put in a Soviet insane asylum.

When a new man, Alexander (Eli Wallach), comes to share his cell, Ivanov complains because his coughing spoils the diminuendos. Of course, so far as the audience is concerned, Ivanov does own an orchestra, in this case the 105-member Pittsburgh Symphony, which sits center stage and follows his every command. His lunacy determines even the title of the play: "Every good boy deserves favor" is a mnemonic phrase to help music students remember the notes on a treble clef staff.

Alexander, by contrast, is mad only in the sense that he was rash enough to protest the arrest of his friends for political activism. If he will recant and confess his error, he can be released when ever he wants. "Your opinions are your symptoms," explains his doctor (Remak Ramsay). "Your disease is dissent."

Who's really crazy? The bestial Soviet state, obviously, and a system that officially turns the sane into the insane and pretends that its own insanity is rea son itself. As slyly as if he were pulling a rabbit from his hat, Stoppard has written a play as propaganda, and its anti-Soviet message is all the more effective for its wit and humor. Andre Previn's music, which he himself conducted, is equally witty. Hinting at Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Previn underlines Stoppard's words and adds his own notes of satire. When Alexander, for instance, says that confinement will at least allow him time to read War and Peace, the orchestra mocks him with a rousing bar from Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture. When the colonel in charge of the hospital finally makes his entrance, he is preceded by a vulgar outburst from the organ.

As agitprop theater, the theater of propaganda and persuasion, Every Good Boy is a conspicuous success. By other dramatic standards, however, it is less satisfactory. Stoppard has always depended on gimmicks, but in his best work, like Travesties (1975), he has used them as a starting point to develop characters and situations. In Every Good Boy the gimmick has taken over, and the play ends where it began, with a brilliant conceit waiting to be developed.