Hapgood by Tom Stoppard

The thing about Tom Stoppard is that you have to bring your brain to the theater. All of it. Stoppard, whom most know as the author of Shakespeare in Love, is the preeminent English playwright of ideas. His normal modus operandi is to take some small bit from his exhaustive knowledge of history, literature, or science and turn it into a gargantuan display of intellect and wit, with enough theatricality thrown in to make it enormously entertaining. The problem is that to really get all the jokes, you have to know a bit of the background. For Travesties , for example, you need to know something about James Joyce, Dadaism, the Russian Revolution, and limericks. For Arcadia , it’s chaos theory. For The Invention of Love, Virgil’s Aeneid comes in handy. For Hapgood , you better bone up on quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and John LeCarre’s novels. Here’s the problem: a Russian physicist, who works for the British, may be passing secrets back to the Russians, with the help of Russian and British twin double agents, under the noses of the Americans who suspect the British of actually working for the Russians. The physics of very small things, such as anti-matter and whizzing electrons, provide the metaphor which gives you the clue to solving the spy game and to Stoppard’s real take on the whole Cold War. Is that all clear now? Jungle Theater (612) 822-7063, www.jungletheater.com