‘Jumpers’ and the critics: Can no one clear the bar?
Most critics have by now reviewed Jumpers, the imported revival of Tom Stoppard’s second major play. Ben Brantley at the Times and John Lahr at the New Yorker clearly want people to go see it, but their cult-like admiration of its razzle-dazzle elements and simultaneous evasiveness as to what the play’s actually about make it seem like Wagnerian-scale artiness meant to be admired rather than enjoyed. This is a shame, and not because there isn’t a grain of truth to it (much of the learnedly dense dialogue has the accessibility of whizzing shrapnel). It’s a shame because Jumpers’ emotional power lies neither in its circus-like atmospherics (acrobats, trapezes, miniature dance orchestra) nor in its author’s celebrated wit, but in the strong, central idea from which it develops: that a society which rejects the possibility of universal truth must in time become divorced from its own humanity.
The play is set in an England of the near future that has absorbed Nietzsche’s obituary of God so thoroughly that the Archbishop of Canterbury is now an agnostic political appointee. It takes place on the morning after a bacchanal hosted by Dotty, a retired musical comedy actress, to honor the crushing election victory of a party called the Radical Liberals. Dotty is beset with the mysteriously gunshot body of McFee, a philosophy professor and member of the acrobatic troupe that provided much of the previous night’s entertainment. She has been quietly assured by Archie, the apparent emcee of the event, that he will return to dispose of the body and all will be well, but her already-crumbling psyche makes the wait difficult and she calls repeatedly on her unresponsive husband, George, to come to her aid. A professor of “moral philosophy,” George stands before a mirror in the next room preparing to debate McFee (presumed alive) at a university symposium. His object is to demonstrate the existence of God and a moral center shared by all human beings. Enter Archie, an urbanely confident champion of moral relativism who turns out to be Vice-Chancellor of George’s university, a licensed psychiatrist, and leader of the acrobatic troupe that is now shy a member. Archie calmly undertakes to remove McFee’s corpse, deter the police inspector that has called, and administer a peculiarly intimate therapy to Dotty. Sinister events meanwhile develop outside George’s and Dotty’s flat: the “Rad-Libs” appear to be subverting democracy, and an astronaut has assaulted and abandoned a colleague on the moon after learning that their spacecraft’s damaged rocket boosters may not get the both of them back to earth. Preferring intellectual abstraction to direct action, George is only momentarily distracted by these developments and Archie’s suspicious antics. Enclosed in his study, he allows the amorality decried in his mock lecture to flourish around him, and a grotesquely comic accident on his part brings the cost of his academic aloofness to an oddly poignant climax.
Brantley’s notion that this is an Arcadia-like play about everything notwithstanding, Jumpers is clearly concerned with the societal implications of dogmatic unbelief and moral relativism. It asserts that to reject a Creator is to reject a purpose for humankind. And morality severed from a higher purpose provides dangerously weak ballast against rapacious self-interest. George provides the following summary of the murdered McFee’s relativism to Bones, a bewildered gumshoe who comes to investigate:
GEORGE: Oh. Well, in simple terms, he believes that people on the whole should tell the truth all right, and keep their promises, and so on, but on the sole grounds that if everybody went around telling lies and breaking their word as a matter of course, normal life would be impossible. Of course, he is defining normality in terms of the truth being told and promises being kept, etcetera, so the definition is circular and not worth very much, but the point is it allows him to conclude that telling lies is not sinful but simply anti-social.
BONES: And murder?
GEORGE: And murder too, yes.
BONES: He thinks there’s nothing wrong with killing people?
GEORGE: Well, put like that, of course … But philosophically, he doesn’t think it’s actually, inherently wrong in itself, no.
As the murder of McFee comes to demonstrate, if the concept of God is, as George concedes, “incredible, indescribable, and definitely shifty,” the definition of normality is endlessly malleable in the hands of gifted, persuasive charlatans like Archie. Normality absent morality can mean eliminating someone who threatens to disrupt a desirable status quo. It can tolerate a social Darwinist’s pragamatism whereby, if an injured spacecraft cannot carry two astronauts off the moon’s surface, one astronaut kicks the other to the ground and boards the craft without him.
These, of course, are not the conclusions of most unbelievers. Nor are all unbelievers moral relativists. But there is resonance in Dotty’s pining for a time before humans had such far-reaching mastery over nature and their own destinies that the moon could still appear as a lustrous, unknowable symbol of our deepest aspirations rather than the cold, colorless sandpit broadcast from the first lunar landing. Humanity is ennobled by common awe for things greater than itself, and once deprived of magnificence and mystery, it cannot always be relied on to fill the ensuing void.
Brantley, Lahr, McCarter, etc. aren’t wrong to point up the play’s comedy (and it is a comedy). Dotty’s attempt to divert attention from the dead McFee with “it’s not as though the alternative were immortality” is itself immortal, as is her “I should never have mentioned unicorns to a Freudian.” But to sum up the substance of the play by saying “Leaps of faith; back-flipping politics; somersaulting, self-inverting words and free-falling nervous breakdowns are all on offer” (Brantley) is either a lazy attempt to hint at breadth by touching on everything and analyzing nothing or discomfort with the play’s quasi-religiosity. In either case, it ill-serves a critic of Brantley’s intelligence, and ill-serves a play of Jumpers’ accomplishment.
Kushner for Bush?
The Angels in America author isn’t likely to overlook his well-publicized positions on healthcare, Iraq, and taxes when he goes to the voting booth this fall. But one of his most cherished causes, National Endowment for the Arts funding, has found a fellow champion in the same administration he is not alone in despising. Dana Gioia, the White House’s NEA chief, recently made the case before Congress for boosting federal arts funding by a whopping $18 million (that’s almost 20%). This is on top of the Shakespeare in American Communities initiative Mr. Ashworth mentions below. Dubya isn’t exactly, er, beloved among the artistic community, but his administration has inarguably done more for the arts—and particularly theater—than any since, well, Nixon’s.
Would John Kerry go even further than Bush? At present, it’s not obvious that he would. The senator pledged last week to cap spending on everything but defense and education and pass a $450+ billion health care package and cut taxes for the middle-class. If he kept to his pledge—especially the part about spending caps—a President Kerry would have little room to increase outlays for a constituency as dim-voiced as the NEA. The current president spends as recklessly as he wishes and is under no such constraints.
I’m not telling anyone who to vote for. Arts funding matters to me, but it frankly doesn’t make even the top five of my priorities in choosing a candidate. I hope there are plenty of other artistic types who feel the same way. But it’s fascinating how, in an environment where political dominance means claiming the center, it took a Democrat to “end welfare as we know it” and a Republican to bolster the NEA.
Shakespeare in America
Shakespeare in American Communities is the national theater touring initiative sponsored by the NEA that was announced about a year ago. (You heard about it here first, remember?)
People we know are involved with this venture, including a Handcart Ensemble founding member and our Ordet photographer in the Arkansas Rep’s Romeo & Juliet, now playing in the midwest.
Be sure to see the Aquila’s Othello in New York May 19 - June 27, or another play in the state of your choosing.