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Houseman in Love
by Edward Karam
Time Out New York
March 1, 2001
Robert Sean Leonard made a screen splash as the sensitive young poetry reader in Dead Poets Society in 1989. Now, he's playing one of the Victorian era's more enigmatic poets, A.E. Housman (18591936), in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. So it's something of a surprise to hear Leonard confess, "Actually, I'm not a big poetry fan."
Relaxing after rehearsal at Lincoln Center, the lanky actor, who lives in Greenwich Village, says he favors the simplicity of poems like Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" but is turned off by the archaic language and obscure references of poets like Tennyson and Byron--and even on occasion Housman.
But his role as the author of A Shropshire Lad is about much more than verse. Housman, who taught Latin at Cambridge in the early 20th century, was a repressed homosexual, working within an academic environment in which any expression or exploration of gay love was forbidden. In Invention, one Oxford don remarks, "In my translation of the Phaedrus, it required all my ingenuity to rephrase [Plato's] depiction of pederastia into the affectionate regard as exists between an Englishman and his wife."
That's typical Stoppard. The English playwright is renowned for turning subjects that sound as dry as a June day in the Sahara into fertile ground for comedy. In Travesties (1975), he mingles the Russian Revolution with The Importance of Being Earnest, and in Arcadia (1993), he blends chaos theory with landscaping. Stoppard has recently been on something of a hot streak--his screenplay for 1998's Shakespeare in Love won an Oscar, and a revival of his play The Real Thing won a Tony last year for best revival.
Even so, some critics still believe that he is more interested in intellect than in passion. That notion irritates Leonard, a Stoppard veteran who starred in Arcadia at Lincoln Center. "It's not a very intelligent criticism," he says. "Tom's sentimental about learning, about humanity, about the progress of humanity and knowledge. [For him,] this all goes hand in hand with passion and sex and love and devotion." Leonard cites The Real Thing as an example. "I'd love to do that play. It tears my heart out."
Having premiered at Britain's Royal National Theatre in 1997, Invention--which has also already been staged in San Francisco and Philadelphia--begins at the River Styx, where the recently deceased Housman (Richard Easton) has just arrived. From the underworld, he looks back at his life, seeing his young self (Leonard) as an Oxford student, pining for Moses Jackson, a straight boy who rejected his love but remained his friend. Thereafter, in real life, Housman directed his passion to scholarship. Stoppard contrasts the poet's unrequited love with the less "respectable" lifestyle of fellow Oxford student Oscar Wilde (whom he never met). Wilde makes a grand entrance at the climax to defend his pursuit of homosexual love, saying, "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
At the ripening age of 32, Leonard certainly doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's too familiar with unrequited love, especially when you consider the websites devoted to gushing over his matinee-idol looks--and his dating history, which includes Gwyneth Paltrow. "I don't know the unrequited love that Housman does," he concedes. "Very few do, I think. Housman truly loved one person his whole life." Still, Leonard says, he has experienced heartache. "I've had nights where I've been crying so hard that I can't seem to find a physical place to be where the crying makes sense. I start moving things and falling over."
Although Leonard's youthful looks are still appropriate for playing students--his Housman ages from 18 to 26--he has been taking on more mature roles of late. They include the dentist Valentine in Shaw's You Never Can Tell at the Roundabout, and the troubled son of an anarchist opposite Kevin Spacey in the recent Broadway version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. In the future, he hopes to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream as well as Richard II.
In the early 1990s, Leonard started Malaparte, a since-disbanded theater company that included his Dead Poets costar Ethan Hawke. "It's hard to explain Malaparte," he says, looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, as the older Housman does in Invention. "We never really existed. We never had an office or anything. That was really just Ethan [Hawke] and Frank Whaley and myself, and Steve Zahn and Jon Marc Sherman. Basically, whenever we found a play we liked, we rented a Theater Row theater and put it on. We weren't really building a company. I think we were just playing around."
Nevertheless, a bond was formed that survives to this day. "Uma and Ethan and I just did a movie with Rick Linklater called Tape that was at Sundance," says Leonard, adding that he appears with Thurman and Zahn in Hawke's new film Chelsea Walls.
While his film career hasn't taken off like that of Hawke (who passes along his Knicks tickets to his friend when he's out of town), Leonard prefers the relative anonymity of stage acting and will occasionally do bigger-budget film and TV work to help pay the bills. The most recent example is Sylvester Stallone's action flick Driven, where he plays "a sort of Jerry Maguire kind of agent to my younger brother, who's the star of [a car racing] team." Stallone plays the veteran driver, and Burt Reynolds is the captain of the team. The movie, which opens only a month after Invention, is about as far away from the world of A.E. Housman as you can get. Notes Leonard with bemusement: "I may be the only actor ever who's worked with Stallone and Stoppard in the same year."
The Invention of Love begins previews at the Lyceum Theatre on Thursday, April 1.
