Probing the Heart’s Mysteries in ‘The Invention of Love’

Well, knock me over with a copy of Catullus. “The Invention of Love,” Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play about the sometime poet and devoted Latin scholar A.E. Housman, has become the improbable snob hit of the current Broadway season. It recently extended its Lincoln Center Theater run at the Lyceum Theatre through July.

How did this happen? Especially when one of Stoppard’s true masterworks, “Arcadia,” made far less of a dent (in another Lincoln Center presentation) six years ago?

The answer is simple: This production’s a lot better. It has been staged lovingly by Globe Theatres artistic director Jack O’Brien, with one eye on the language and the other on finding apt visual corollaries to that language.

O’Brien here re-teams with the brilliant scenic designer Bob Crowley, his collaborator on the Lincoln Center production of another extremely tricky Stoppard outing, “Hapgood.” For “The Invention of Love”--the title referring to the early creation of love poetry so revered by Housman--O’Brien and Crowley unfurl autumnal images of Oxford, with everyone scooting around on bicycles and professors dwarfed by comically oversized stacks of books, a la Lewis Carroll.

Stoppard has written an essentially undramatic dreamscape. The recently deceased Housman (Richard Easton), about to cross the River Styx, assesses his recessive life and great unrequited love for the athlete Moses Jackson (David Harbour), a fellow Oxford man. En route, the elder Housman runs into his younger self (Robert Sean Leonard).

There’s a long scene near the end of Act 1 shared by the two Housmans. As they discuss the niceties and textual flaws of the classics they love as much as life itself, Stoppard’s playfulness is tinged with rue; the older man cannot prevent the younger’s heartbreak to come.

Stoppard’s extreme tact regarding Housman’s hopeless crush has its limitations. Though writing a Housman play is in itself an act of biographical speculation, Stoppard is compelled primarily by Housman the burrowing scholar, who left his “real” life above ground. (The playwright, for example, declines to speculate on Housman’s possible affair with Jackson’s brother.) As Stoppard’s version of Oscar Wilde says: “Biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.”

As the younger Housman, Leonard is terrific. In his subtle portrait, you see the makings of a lifelong emotional stoic, who did manage, nonetheless, to unpack his heart by way of his own poetry. I’m less taken with Easton’s Housman. Acclaimed by the New York reviewers, Easton is bright and vivid and practically giddy with enthusiasm. But he seems entirely too hale, hearty and hardy for Housman. In his performance, you don’t sense a man whose life was “marked by long silences.”

Still, O’Brien’s ensemble is generally very strong. There’s a slight strenuousness to some of the work; here and there, you wouldn’t mind more subtlety. But O’Brien gets particularly flavorsome support from Michael Stuhlbarg’s silly goose Pollard; Davis’ Wilde; Jeff Weiss’ wisecracking boatman, Charon; Byron Jennings’ flustered moralist Jowett; Martin Rayner’s dry fellow Oxford prof, Pater; and Mark Nelson’s Chamberlain, a man living the life only dreamed by Housman.

A former critic himself--and of course the only truly happy critics are former ones--Stoppard has long relished the comic possibilities of characters obsessed with a certain field of study. They’re always going off on their pet subject, while dodging other, less arcane, more difficult matters. That’s Housman, all right. “The Invention of Love” may not be top-shelf Stoppard, but no living playwright has more eloquent stuff on his second shelf.

* “The Invention of Love,” Lincoln Center Theater at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th St., New York City. $30-$60. (212) 239-6200.