Falling in Love With "The Invention of Love"

All art is a conversation between the people who make the thing and the people seeing, reading or listening to it. And the first time I saw Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, it didn’t speak to me at all. That 2001 production of this eulogistic memory play about the poet and classics scholar A.E. Housman was staged by the powerhouse duo of director Jack O’Brien and set designer Bob Crowley. It ran for 108 performances, was nominated for five Tonys and both Richard Easton and Robert Sean Leonard won for playing the older and younger versions of Housman. 

But the play might just as well have been speaking Greek to me. I found it to be tedious and pretentious. So I was totally unprepared for how deeply affected I was by the far more modest production of the play that The MAP Theater has just opened at Theaterlab, a small space on the third floor of a building on West 36th Street.

Maybe age and my increasing thoughts about mortality have something to do with that. For the play opens as Housman, who having just died at the age of 77, is greeted by Charon, the ferryman in Greek mythology who transports souls across the River Styx that separates the realms of the living and the dead. 

Along the way, Housman looks back at scenes from his life, including his student days at Oxford, the poetry he wrote, the many scholarly debates he had over the meanings of art and beauty but, most of all, he recalls the lifelong unrequited love he had for his classmate Moses Jackson at a time when Oscar Wilde ended up serving time in prison for loving another man.

I’m not going to pretend that I now understand all the literary and philosophical allusions in The Invention of Love. Stoppard liked to insist that he just wanted to be entertaining (click here to read about that) but he packed so much of that intellectual stuff into this nearly three hour play that the Broadway production included a packet of explanatory notes inside its Playbill. 

But all of that seems to matter less this time around because MAP’s artistic director Zachary Elkind has homed in on the emotional underpinnings of the play: the frustration caused by having to repress the passions one feels, the resignation that comes with realizing that certain dreams will never be accomplished, the melancholy of accepting that time actually is finite. 

And now that a quarter century of experiences has passed since my first encounter with the play, I found myself checking off all three. Although you don't really need to be AARP eligible to appreciate this production. The twentysomething-year-old woman seated next to me looked to be just as moved by it as I was.

Elkind’s staging is spare but effective. He keeps things moving so that the words don’t overwhelm but he leaves ample room for the considerable humor that Stoppard has sprinkled throughout the play. Charon’s boat, which sits in the middle of the playing space with the audience seated on both sides, is the primary set piece, serving a role similar to the centering one that the car played in the recent revival of Death of a Salesman.  And the costumes here are just simple late Victorian suits and academic gowns, although I’m not quite sure why nearly all the actors are barefoot. 

Such simplicity puts an even greater weight on the acting. And, for the most part, Elkind’s cast delivers. It’s no surprise that David Greenspan, an icon of the downtown theater community, so deftly captures the arrogant prissiness, the wry humor and the wistfulness of the older Housman, with even his ramrod posture making clear how Housman felt pride in being smarter than most of his peers and regret for being less emotionally secure. 

Yaron Lotan, an actor new to me, was just as captivating in a performance that combines the gawkiness of the younger Housman with distinctive shadings of the later man that we see in Greenspan’s rendering of him. Meanwhile José Espinosa portrays the straight Moses Jackson with pitch perfect golden-boy insouciance. And Daniel Liu is so wonderfully natural as Housman’s best friend the bibliographer and scholar Alfred Pollard that I found myself leaning forward in delight every time he walked on stage.  

The Invention of Love doesn’t get done a lot. And so I’m sure that devotees of Stoppard, who died last year at the age of 88, already have this rare revival on their must-see list. But take it from a former apostate like me, this potent little production has found a way to speak eloquently to the rest of us too.