Colliding memories and memorable cleverness

Nigel Gore is Henry Carr and Molly Schreiber is Cecily in Publick Theatre's staging of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties." (Courtesy of publick theatre)

"Travesties" is early Tom Stoppard, which is to say that it is dazzling, witty, and exhausting. It's so busy being clever that it can't quite be anything else - but it's so clever that, most of the time, it's hard to mind.

The Publick Theatre's current production at the Boston Center for the Arts, which Diego Arciniegas directs with boundless but occasionally unfocused energy, has one terrific asset that makes it even easier to overlook the play's flaws: Nigel Gore, in the central role of Henry Carr. It's Carr, an actual but minor historical figure, whose addled reminiscences form the crooked spine of the story, and Gore dances through the role's devilish turns of colliding memories and careening wordplay with a master's grace.

But, oh, that story. Stoppard seized upon the historical coincidence that the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, the Marxist Vladimir Lenin, and the novelist James Joyce all lived in Zurich in 1917 - as did Carr, an obscure British diplomat who appeared in a stage production managed by Joyce and, Stoppard surmises, could have met the others at the Zurich public library. From there he embroiders a couple of hours' worth of theatrical mischief that somehow encompasses Marxism, "Ulysses," English music-hall burlesque, and "The Importance of Being Earnest."

Obviously, plausibility of plot and depth of character study are not Stoppard's chief interests here. The play mostly takes place in the now elderly Carr's mind, as he reconstructs his (often faulty) memories of his encounters with these famous men and a few others in the shadow of World War I. Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde's characters from "Earnest" - both the one Carr played ("not Ernest, the other one," as he puts it) and the lovely young ladies, Gwendolyn and Cecily - weave through the "real" historical scenes.

It helps to remember the Wilde play, though it's so mashed up here that things would probably make just as much sense without any knowledge of it. It also helps to have a fondness for limericks and bad rhymes. Enjoying long arguments about the relative roles and merits of art and politics doesn't hurt, either - particularly if you're willing to watch those arguments unspool in multiple and digressive ways that don't ever find a neat ending. Like much of Stoppard's early work, "Travesties" demands that its audience be at once quick-witted and slow to judge - sharp enough to appreciate its surface brilliance, yet soft enough to accept a play that has so many ideas it can never settle on which ones it's really about.

Gore romps his way through all this with beguiling ease, even when Stoppard has Carr's memory fail so that he plays the same scene several times through with variations. A multiple exchange with his unflappable butler (played with consummate sangfroid by Dafydd Rees) is particularly amusing; so are the increasingly chaotic Wildean interludes with Gwendolyn and Cecily, both rendered with a delightful mix of vivacity and depth by Lynn Guerra and Molly Schreiber, respectively. Alejandro Simoes gives Tzara a hilariously manic energy, nicely offset by Gabriel Kuttner's more solemn Lenin and Derry Woodhouse's dreamy, only intermittently Irish-sounding Joyce.

J. Michael Griggs's set fits a little awkwardly into the Plaza Theatre's space; that air of slight dislocation, of everything being at just the wrong angle, may be a deliberate underscoring of the play's depiction of a "real" world shown slightly askew. But it does feel as if it forces some odd and unlikely entrances and exits. Like the lighting design, which smartly signals Carr's memory slips with flashes of red and white but also introduces a few weird moments of glare and shadow, it may be a little too clever for its own good. Something like "Travesties" itself.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.