Bucky Comes to Cambridge

A visionary’s world
By Don Aucoin
Globe Staff January 21, 2011
CAMBRIDGE — The last time Thomas Derrah appeared in an American Repertory
Theater production, in the September “Cabaret’’ that starred Amanda Palmer, he
wore a dress to play Fraulein Schneider, the landlady of Sally Bowles.
In “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,’’ Derrah’s attire
is nothing special — a simple black suit and bow tie — but his performance sure is.
Derrah so persuasively and entertainingly channels the eccentric polymath of the title
that this one-man show at the ART, written and directed by D.W. Jacobs, comes
across as a mind-stretching marriage of “The Last Lecture’’ and “Mark Twain
Tonight!’’
Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and
manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer
David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough,
suggests a swirling cosmos — Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the
workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.
The man nicknamed Bucky was an iconoclastic scientist, architect, engineer,
inventor, social theorist, environmentalist, and futurist from whom ideas — a
geodesic dome, a three-wheeled car, a modular home that could be mass-produced
and airlifted anywhere — burst forth in wild profusion for a good chunk of the 20th
century.
He sought not just new ways of looking at the world, but also to persuade the world
to take a big-picture look at itself, in particular its propensity for war, waste, and a
misallocation of resources that leads to widespread hunger.
Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct
and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to
decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense,
as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great
Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing;
mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’
This is not to say, however, that every moment of “R. Buckminster Fuller’’ is
/
scintillating. At one point, Bucky declares: “But you have to saturate yourself with
information. Saturate!’’, and audiences are likely to feel over-saturated with
information at times, especially when Bucky goes into eye-glazing detail about
tetrahedrons and octahedrons and icosahedrons, or when he emits such lines as
“Love synergetically integrates metaphysical radiation and physical gravity, whose
interpulsative, intercomplentary oppositeness regenerates life.’’
I think he means that love makes the world go ’round, but I wouldn’t stake my life on
it.
But overall, “R. Buckminster Fuller’’ feels fluid rather than static. Jacobs the director
does a favor to Jacobs the writer with some inventive staging that brings the life of
the mind to life. There’s a visual allure to the ART production, thanks to Cuthbert,
whose set and lighting design create an atmosphere that is cool without being chilly,
and to video designer Jim Findlay, who projects well-chosen images (wind turbines,
churning waves, photos of Fuller as a young man, footage of his inventions) onto a
rear screen.
The focus, though, remains on Derrah, who finds the human being inside the
formidable egghead as he veers from Fuller’s life story to an explication of his ideas
and back again. He describes how he was admitted to Harvard, but was kicked out
after he skipped his midyear exams to go to New York to see a show featuring an
actress with whom he was smitten. “I took the whole chorus out to dinner and spent
my second year’s allowance in one shot,’’ Bucky says, without a trace of regret.
He recounts how his family then sent him to work as an apprentice millwright in a
cousin’s cotton mill in Quebec, and he makes it sound like a more valuable
education than the one he got at the little college on the Charles. He went back to
Harvard eventually, but was expelled again. “I hated memorizing things,’’ is all Bucky
says by way of explanation.
Derrah takes us through the death of Fuller’s first child, his struggles with drinking,
the time he contemplated suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan.
But more typical of the buoyant spirit that suffuses “R. Buckminster Fuller’’ is the
wondering excitement in Derrah’s voice as he describes Bucky’s time in the US
Navy during World War I. It was then that Bucky first saw the world-transforming
possibilities of technology — a quest that would consume his life.
“We were accelerating,’’ he says. “A new world was coming in. We were going from
track to trackless, from wire to wireless, from visible to invisible. . . . to
ephemeralization. Ever doing more and more with less and less. Ephemeralization.’’
Adds the man who would later envision floating cities, and much more: “It was as if
only the impossible happened.’’
Reputedly, there was a running joke among audiences who heard Fuller lecture: “It
was great! What did he say?’’ You may feel similar sentiments after you leave the
American Repertory Theater. But even if you’re scratching your head, chances are
you’ll be glad you heard him say it.
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.