Heroes

MAP QUESTION Darlow, Nussbaum and Peeples, from left, retrace their steps.

Photo: Johnny Knight

Sibleyras’s airy trifle of a play concerns three old soldiers essentially confined to the terrace of a retirees’ home in mid-20th-century France but still imaginatively roaming the world. It’s the sort of piece made to showcase its actors, and Remy Bumppo’s assembled a distinguished trio for Stoppard’s 2005 translation. Darlow, in particular, delights as the acerbically misanthropic Gustave; he opens the play with a systematic denunciation of the calendar, month by month, and his mood brightens only when talking to the terrace’s stone canine. Nussbaum and Peeples ably serve the script’s delicate wit, though Peeples’s Philippe occasionally comes across a bit too broadly: His periodic lapses into unconsciousness are invariably played for laughs, never accruing the piercing bathos of Gustave’s momentary breakdown.

Heroes touches lightly on some vexed issues. Comradely as they seem, the three men are separated by class divisions, though these only rarely come to the foreground. And their military past has left them all diminished mentally or physically; if the particulars remain shrouded, Gustave’s suggestion that they might make their way to Indochina carries a hint of ironic chill. For the most part, though, they’re content to play out their days in boyish reverie. While their lecherous observations about the jeunes filles at a neighboring school might remind us of the French sympathy for Polanski, a planned excursion to a nearby stand of poplars, requiring the company to “rope up” in preparation for climbing, yields a sublime comic poetry. Heroes may not alter any world views, but it’s a testament to theater’s power to charm.

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