From here the play jumps back and forth, though most of the drearier act one is set in Prague, where the Czech-born playwright's alter ego is only slowly politicized, at first resisting his dissident friends' petitions. What turns Jan into a signer of the human-rights manifesto Charter 77 is the Communist government's persecution of the real-life Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, who took their name from Frank Zappa and their morbid drone from the Velvet Underground. According to Jan, the Plastics are not "heretics" but "pagans," inciting the government by their very indifference. Both they and Jan do jail time while, back in Cambridge, Max's arid ideas of cognition go mano-a-mano with the dying Eleanor's white-knuckled defense of identity as a messy stew of brain, sex, and soul.
Rock 'n' Roll is a dense, emotionally and politically complex play, ingeniously constructed so that, as it progresses, the actress playing Eleanor becomes daughter Esme, an adult flower child adrift, while the actress playing teenage Esme returns as her daughter Alice, a prodigy whose protectorate is the now-reclusive Barrett, "an old baldy on a bike" who was once her tripping mom's "beautiful boy as old as music, half-goat, half-god." In ACT artistic director Carey Perloff's warmhearted if not always bristling production, these two women — chiseled, waifish Renû Augesen and cherubic Summer Serafin — look nothing alike, but, hey, use your imagination.
Augesen's moribund Eleanor is more frail than galvanic, but she conveys the wistful rebel spirit of the adult Esme, who when she gets to grab onto a pummeled Pan she hadn't expected seizes it. And Serafin is a convincing adolescent of both acid and academic stripes. One-time ART mainstay Jack Willis is a welcome returnee as the volatile Max. And as Jan, Tony nominee Manoel Felciano ages convincingly from insular young hedonist — for whom taking a stand is tantamount to "moral exhibitionism" — to ruefully seasoned if still rocking citizen of the world.
The production at the Huntington lacks the mesmeric rush the combination of brainpower, rock outbursts, and fiery acting brought to the original Royal Court Theatre production that opened in London in 2006 and transferred to Broadway a year ago. But it's thoughtful and smart and does handsome service to a mighty work. Rock and roll is one thing, but you won't catch me saying it's only Tom Stoppard but I like it.
The Seafarer is Conor McPherson's second play set on Christmas Eve, and neither is anyone's idea of The Nutcracker. The 2000 Dublin Carol centers on an alcoholic undertaker confronting the wreckage of his life. Rooted in Celtic folklore and awash in Irish whiskey, the 2008 Tony-nominated The Seafarer, seen here in an expertly acted area premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company (at the Calderwood Pavilion through December 13), continues the 37-year-old Irish writer's defiance of Dickens — McPherson's spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and possibly Future come in a bottle. Yet the dramatist's claim that his latest work is "his most optimistic play yet" is not without credence.
