Theatre in Review: The Common Pursuit (Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre)

	Jacob Fishel, Tim McGeever, Josh Cooke, Lucas Near-Vergrugghe. Photo: Joan Marcus

Time's wicked way with the ideals and ambitions of the young provides the theme for The Common Pursuit. Watching Moisés Kaufman's revival at the Roundabout, I felt the sting as deeply as any of the beleaguered Cambridgians who populate Simon Gray's drama. How was it, I wondered, that a play, which, in 1986, seemed so witty and accurate in its insights, now appears a mere shadow of itself, its point of view predictable and obvious, its humor so crabbed and unforgiving? Was the original, with the author directing a cast that included the young Dylan Baker, Michael Countryman, Peter Friedman, and Nathan Lane -- so superior? Or has the passing of the years blunted the play's power?

The answer, I believe, is a little bit of both. Gray has written a kind of chronicle play that follows the progress (or lack thereof) of a group of professional intellectuals over the course of approximately 15 years, beginning with their undergraduate days at an unnamed college of Cambridge University. It is there that Stuart, the group's de facto ringleader, launches a literary journal titled The Common Pursuit. Others in the crowd include Humphrey, a philosopher with a prematurely middle-aged mien and a daunting willingness to share his moral judgments, no matter how painful; Nick, a chain-smoking wag whose ambition is to be the theatre critic for the Sunday Times; and Peter, a historian who, thanks to his dreamboat looks, has cut a wide swath through the university's female population. Slightly on the sidelines are Martin, the group's official dullard -- his essay about cats has been roundly rejected by Stuart -- who signs on as the business manager, and Marigold, Stuart's lover and a woman of somewhat smaller ambitions.

The title, an allusion to writings of the critic F. R. Leavis, provides a clue to Stuart's critical standards, which combine a rigorous adherence to the best of traditional thought with a full embrace of modernism at its most difficult. (Stuart is especially devoted to Hubert Stout, a T. S. Eliot-style poet noted for his mandarin style.) And indeed most of the tension generated in The Common Pursuit has to do with the ways in which Stuart and his friends are forced to lower their standards, reshaping themselves to the demands of the mass market. Nick pens catty literary gossip for Glamour and ends up on a BBC book chat show, co-hosted by his college nemesis. Peter, his personal life a tangle of adulteries, must grind out a series of coffee table history books to keep his large family financially afloat. Stuart sees his journal through a decade of losses and, in an attempt to save his foundering marriage to Marigold, allows The Common Pursuit to become subsidized, and, later, subsumed by Martin's publishing firm.

The nature of Martin's almost unnatural devotion to Stuart, Marigold, and the journal is the topic of much speculation, and its revelation, late in the play, which precipitates the group's final fracture, constitutes Gray's most confident sleight-of-hand exercise. Otherwise, the bad news -- involving garden-variety backbiting, closeted homosexuality, mental decline, romantic betrayal, and even murder -- arrives with tick-tock regularity, generating little surprise. Inside the mechanical, deterministic universe of the play, nothing good ever happens; disillusionment is the only option. Gray was too mordant a writer to wring his hands over lost youth or shattered ideals, but his detachment is as counterproductive as false sentimentality would have been. We should at least feel that these people, and their plans for the future, are of some importance. Because the characters are so thin and lacking in substance, this state of perpetual decline becomes monotonous, and, even when Gray surprises us with one of his end-of-scene reversals, it hardly seems to matter.

These weaknesses are severely exacerbated by Kaufman's production, which is filled with attractive, talented actors who appear to have little or no understanding of the characters they are playing. (That, in the first scene, they come across not as gifted young Turks but irritatingly smug collegians, is one of the production's biggest debits; their problems don't become even modestly compelling until late in the second act.) The best work comes from Kristen Bush as Marigold, whose apparent passivity masks a coolly observant eye and a willingness to take ruthless action to preserve her happiness, and Jacob Fishel, whose Martin progresses from being the class fool to possibly the only productive adult in the group. Despite looking far too old, Tim McGeever makes a good stab at Humphrey, trapped between the glories of Hegel and the lure of train station men's rooms, but the character is woefully underwritten. As Simon, Josh Cooke lacks charisma and intellectual poise; his rushed vocal delivery, swallowing whole words and phrases, doesn't help. Kieran Campion's Peter is such an empty-headed pretty boy that he hardly seems capable of turning out even the lightweight tomes that are said to betray his talent. As Nick, a role that Nathan Lane once mined for multitudinous laughs, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe is remarkably irritating, especially his hacking cough -- one waits patiently for the doctor's report -- and his frequent complaints about a female acquaintance who publishes novels about her menstrual cycle.

That running gag about a feminist author suggests that Gray's celebrated knack for tart comedy is rather like a wine that has been decanted for too long; its intoxicating properties have vanished, leaving the unpleasant taste of pure vinegar. Too often, mere rudeness is offered up as the height of wit. "She's not expecting; she's merely pregnant," says Stuart, correcting a friend for using a common phrase. Speaking of a student who committed suicide, Humphrey sniffs, "People we convert into jokes have a responsibility not to do this sort of thing." Peter, booking a hotel room for his latest fling, assures the young lady, "We'll have a post-coital view of the Strand." "This is simultaneously bland and acid. Is it English?" asks Humphrey after a sip of wine, in a comment that comes perilously close to summing up the experience of watching The Common Pursuit. And really, when one character announces that he has lost his way professionally, must Gray also make him both sterile and (temporarily) impotent? Why not toss in blindness and a brain tumor for good measure?

In any case, The Common Pursuit looks and sounds good. Derek McLane's gold-framed setting moves from Stuart's Cambridge digs -- with the university's spires in the background -- to a decrepit London office that becomes progressively more posh as the play goes on. The set also allows for a rapid transition back to Cambridge for the ironic epilogue, a flashback to allegedly happier days. David Lander's lighting follows a kind of day-into-night progression as the characters' lives darken. Clint Ramos' costumes provide many clues to the characters' many changes of status; he is especially adept at transforming Bush from a casual undergraduate to a mature-looking headmistress. Daniel Kilgore's sound design offers solid reinforcement for his jazzy original music, some of which sounds like a modern analogue to the Bach concertos that Stuart keeps on his turntable.

The Common Pursuit is never boring, but it is informed by a reflexive, wash-and-wear cynicism that almost necessarily results in predictable plotting and thinnish characterizations. It's hard to care about their journey when you already know the itinerary.--David Barbour