Love That Dared Not Speak at All

Martyred by the press for acts of “gross indecency,” Oscar Wilde has left prison and repaired to the French seaside. He reads aloud from the poetry collection “A Shropshire Lad” by A.E. Housman, a gift sent by the author, a man he never met.

In a dream-state, part of the overall lovelorn dreaminess that is Tom Stoppard’s latest play, Housman (James Cromwell) meets Wilde (Marco Barricelli) in a fantasy encounter between two of Oxford University’s more dissimilar alums.

“I took charge of my own myth,” Wilde says. “I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new. . . . Where were you when all this was happening?”

Housman’s reply: “At home.”

In its U.S. premiere at the American Conservatory Theater, “The Invention of Love” finds Stoppard taking on a dauntingly recessive character. On the one hand, Housman (1859-1936) was a rigorous Latin scholar and textual critic. On the other, he wrote poetry steeped in farewells, dying soldiers and banked emotional fires.

Tough stuff to activate on a stage? Yes. Even when the scholarly debates on Horace come from someone as dazzling as the author of “Arcadia” and the co-author of “Shakespeare in Love,” this is “Housman in Love,” a different and maundering story altogether.

Housman fell hard for a classmate at Oxford, the athletic (and heterosexual) Moses Jackson. Their subsequent loaded friendship, unrequited love incarnate, at once tantalized and thwarted Housman’s closeted life--a life, according to Stoppard, “marked by long silences,” devoted to the service of love poems written centuries earlier.

“The Invention of Love” contains passages as graceful as anything in the whole of Stoppard. Director Carey Perloff’s staging offers many of the clean-lined pictorial strengths of her 1999 staging (another U.S. premiere) of Stoppard’s “Indian Ink.”

Onstage at the Geary Theater, the results are elegant, accomplished--and somewhat becalmed. Crucially, the elder and younger Housmans played by Cromwell and Jason Butler Harner don’t really go together. They’re not so much intriguingly “unknowable” halves of a person as they are, finally, mismatched.

The towering Cromwell, blessed with an expressive, mellifluous cello-like voice, lacks an interpretive connection with the eager, chin-up, younger Housman as portrayed by Harner. Harner’s work is competent but a misjudgment. The performance doesn’t jibe with the text or with Cromwell’s depiction of what’s to come.

Early on, the two Housmans--the newly deceased 77-year-old and the university-age version--meet on the River Styx. Elder Housman is being ferried across. A boat gliding the other way, on a Magritte-like scenic landscape by excellent designer Loy Arcenas, bears young Housman and two school chums, Jackson (Garret Dillahunt) and Pollard (Gord Rand, a terrific Canadian actor and this ensemble’s standout).

The play drifts into the past. We follow Housman as he braves the highly factionalized fiefdoms of Oxford literary scholarship. Oh, for the days “when Oxford was still the sweet city of dreaming spires,” the elder Housman says. The central ache of his life, however, wasn’t nostalgia for old days; it was Jackson.

Stoppard’s speculations are discreet. The Norman Page biography of Housman suggests a likely affair between Housman and Jackson’s brother (not depicted here) as well as later dalliances abroad. None of that here. For Stoppard’s dramatic purposes, Housman remains a one-man man, a stifled victim of the Victorian social code.

In films as diverse as “Babe” and “L.A. Confidential,” Cromwell has proved his ability to activate characters whose cards stay close to the vest. He’s an apt choice for this assignment. Yet even within the observational, contemplative parameters of the role, Cromwell holds out on us. The play needs a moment or two wherein Housman lets us in, however briefly.

Cromwell’s technical skill and natural authority carry us through--through a very long Act 1 discussion between the Housmans, even--but you can’t help but think a good actor is on the brink of something deeper.

An actor, or a director, should do only so much to “‘sell” a thickish play such as this. Perloff’s production goes for clarity at the expense of pacing and rhythmic variety, which is too bad, because in Stoppard’s own words he’s after “emotional storms” in a “‘tiny teacup.” And yet, any new Stoppard play is still a new Stoppard play.

Even when it’s taking its sweet time to smell the poetic roses, “The Invention of Love” luxuriates in Housman’s universe of language. The scholar and the poet, two men in one, knew more than one language of love. He simply wasn’t as lucky in English as he was in translating from the Latin.

* “The Invention of Love,” American Conservatory Theater, Geary Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m. (except 7 p.m. today); Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Also: 8 p.m. Feb. 13; 2 p.m. Wednesday and Feb. 2. Ends Feb. 13. $14 to $55. (415) 749-2228. Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes.

James Cromwell: A.E. Housman, age 77

Jason Butler Harner: Young Housman, age 18-26

Steven Anthony Jones: Charon

Gord Rand: Alfred William Pollard

Garret Dillahunt: Moses John Jackson

Charles Dean: Rector of Lincoln College

Michael Santo: Walter Pater

Matthew Boston: Chamberlain

Ken Ruta: John Ruskin

W. Francis Walters: Benjamin Jowett

Brian Keith Russell: Robinson Ellis

Lorri Holt: Katharine Housman

Marco Barricelli: Oscar Wilde

Written by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Carey Perloff. Set by Loy Arcenas. Costumes by Deborah Dryden. Lighting by James F. Ingalls. Music and sound score by Michael Roth. Sound by Garth Hemphill. Stage manager Kimberly Mark Webb.