The New York Times-20080127-A Little Suspense Travels a Long Way
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A Little Suspense Travels a Long Way
Full Text (663 words)ANIMAL, vegetable or mineral? Bigger than a breadbox? Useful or decorative?
Most people consider such distinctions only when they are trapped in a car, playing 20 questions. In a Tom Stoppard play, though, little questions about everyday things take on cosmic significance. On his stage, the minutiae of rock music and landscape gardening are perfectly acceptable sparring partners for quantum mechanics and communist ideology.
It certainly keeps things interesting. Whether he has you wondering where the literary sleuths of Arcadia, or how the rock-obsessed Czech dissident in Rock 'n' Roll (now at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in Manhattan), will end up, it is clear that Mr. Stoppard loves a little mystery.
Who doesn't? For playwright and audience alike, there is no greater moment of satisfaction than when all is revealed. It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth, he said.
He would know, having for 30 years carried a portable enigma, the drop-front of which opens a surprisingly clear window into the mind of its porter. This intriguing valise looks as if it should be handcuffed to his wrist and contain enriched uranium, the Dead Sea Scrolls or a kidney. But no -- it holds books, and very neatly, as he has explained countless times to curious fellow travelers.
Everyone always wants to know what it is, and where they can get one, he said.
The case was first spotted 30 years ago on a baggage carousel at Kennedy Airport by Mr. Stoppard's wife at the time, Miriam. Curious, she approached its owner, a young man who told her what it was, and that he had obtained it from the Manhattan luggage maker T. Anthony. She promptly bought one for her husband, who, at least while traveling, has scarcely ever let go of it.
While the cases were still in production -- T. Anthony stopped making them, along with other ocean-liner-era pieces like suitcase bars and traveling jewelry cases, in the early 1980s -- Mr. Stoppard gave them to several friends as a gift.
I just thought that this is one of the great things that civilization has produced, Mr. Stoppard said with typical restraint. What he admires is its supreme utility. No bigger than a breadbox, it holds a small shelf of books, so he does not have to distribute all their weight among various suitcases.
If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading, he said. So I bring eight. On his most recent trip to New York, the list ran to a dozen, including Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Tony Crilly's 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know and G. E. Moore's Ethics. The case, constructed of leather, wood and steel (animal, vegetable and mineral), is so amazingly sturdy that it has survived the checked-luggage netherworld for three decades.
The piece is hardly a slouch in the style department, either. Covered in bridle leather, it recalls the glory days of 19th-century travel, when nothing was too strange to lug halfway around the world. Today, when the mere mention of coach could be perceived as an instrument of torture, you must bring your glamour with you.
It goes well beyond its function, Mr. Stoppard said. There are all kinds of connections it brings with it. It's like having something substantial which you don't have to justify because it does have a use, but it's also like bringing a bit of home with you.
And since he is a master at balancing the intriguingly dramatic and the bluntly political, it must be nice to find that equilibrium mirrored in what the British call a grip.
Useful or decorative? Rock star that he is, and communist that he isn't, Mr. Stoppard will take both, please.
[Illustration]PHOTO: CLUE: The key to this Tom Stoppard mystery? (Plot spoiler: a book satchel by T. Anthony.) (PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES)