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When you go to a rock concert, typically there is some music playing on the PA system as people mill around, or try to find their seats, or just wish they’d had a cigarette before they came in.  It’s background music designed to set the mood a little bit.

When my wife and I sat down in our mezzanine seats at the Huntington Theatre on Saturday, happily anticipating Tom Stoppard’s play Rock’n’Roll, music was playing on the PA, just like it does before a rock concert.  The crowd was a lot older, though.  I mean, a lot older.  Hell, I’m a lot older.  Anyway, the PA played some Syd Barrett (a founder of Pink Floyd, in case you missed it), and then Mick Jagger sang “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It)” — pleasant enough fare.  And then, about 8 minutes before curtain (“curtain” being a euphemism for “friendly but authoritarian instruction to shut off your cell phone and pager”), to my shock and delight, the song that came on was “Sister Ray” by The Velvet Underground.  Now, most people would not like “Sister Ray,” which is 17+ minutes of guitar and organ chaos somehow held together by Mo Tucker’s metronomic drumming; and the theme of this song, and some of the lyrics - well, they’re pretty pornographic, to be blunt.  So I said to my wife, they must be gonna edit this, they can’t just play it.  But they played it!  Well, about 13 minutes of it, and then the curtain rose.  And I was looking around the theatre thinking, hey, no one is even noticing this music.  What kind of play is this?

Well, the answer was, not a very good play, in our estimation, and we left at intermission and had a pizza.

Since I find it too boring to recount, I will borrow from Jim Sullivan’s plot summary in his online review, repeated here:

The play?  Set in both Cambridge, England and Prague, it revolves around the clash in Czechoslovakia, the adamant communist arguments of the professor Max (Jack Willis), the way Jan (Manoel Felciano) mixes music and politics, and engages with Max and the others.  It’s about freedom and restriction, human rights, love, maturity, the inevitability of change and how people change.  One theme that emerges is how rock ‘n’ roll, the best of it anyway, symbolizes dissidence and freedom throughout the whole play.  At the end of the first act, when Jan comes home from prison and finds the police have shattered his beloved record collection, he says “It’s only rock ‘n’ roll.”  Free from prison, but how free?

Or, as my dog always used to think I was saying, Blah Blah Blah.
It’s true that rock’n’roll can be great, spiritually uplifting music; I am the first to agree.  And it’s true that a band called Plastic People of the Universe was suppressed in Czechoslovakia by the Soviets. The Plastics, who played with fervor if not skill (kinda like the punks), were indeed a symbol of the move to freedom and independence in that country.  In point of fact, they were revered.  (Their music doesn’t do much for me, but that’s not the point.)  Many found it uplifting in a new way, as they also found Syd Barrett’s music energizing in the play.  But while I can get really excited about great music, I just could not care about the character Jan’s love for the Plastics and the rest.  To me Jan’s love for his music collection — he even has a Fugs album — was no credible substitute for the movement toward spiritual and political freedom that the play is supposed to be about.  Great sets, though.

In the end, too much talking, not enough engaging.  It’s hard to enjoy a play without feeling at least one actor’s hand on your heart.

Skip the play.  “Sister Ray” is on White Light White Heat(1968) by the Velvets.  It was recorded in one take for the album.  In concert it often ran over 30 minutes.  But it’s only Rock’n’Roll.