Review: ‘Groucho Marx Meets T.S. Eliot’ is a clever contemporary production with deft performances

Oh, the awkwardness of being known for something, then being asked to perform it on the spot.

Groucho Marx is sitting at dinner in London in 1964 when his host, the poet and critic T.S. Eliot, asks him to do the quippy, pun-filled speech from the trial scene in his 1933 film “Duck Soup.”

It was one of Groucho’s most memorable performances in a movie that captured the fascist atmosphere gathering over Europe at the time.

Groucho takes the cigar from his mouth. “I don’t remember it,” he says. But Eliot has the speech down pat.

“Then you do it,” Groucho tells him.

Eliot takes a hard pass.

Subtle, contemporary and fully embodied by actors Jim Cunningham and John Middleton, the scene plays out with immediacy in “Groucho Marx Meets T.S. Eliot,” Jeffrey Hatcher’s clever new play that premiered over the weekend at Minneapolis’ Illusion Theater.

But the action is wholly imagined in a play that has lots of situational laughs from the two competitive men trying to one-up each other. Hatcher and his son, Evan, who is listed as a creative consultant, based this piece of speculative playwriting on the only known meeting between Marx and Eliot, two men who were once pillars in their respective fields but were meeting in their twilight years.

Michael Robins’ sharp production of this two-hander is smart and ear-grabbing. He coaxes deft performances from Cunningham and Middleton, including a tricky bit of audience improvisation.

“Groucho” is larded with quotes and interpolations from Eliot’s writings, including his most famous work, “The Waste Land.” You don’t need to know “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or any of Eliot’s writings to get “Groucho,” although the play is a richer experience if you do.

“Groucho” also riffs on the comic actor’s best-known scenes and routines. In fact, the tension in the play, which the playwright acknowledges in meta-theatrical nods, is how to make us care about these two men in a world so far removed from vaudeville, the Marx brothers’ lodestone, and from the power that poetry once held in the culture (Eliot was a Nobel-winning demigod).

Both as written and as played by Cunningham, Groucho is a contemporary figure full of zing and zest. Sure, he has done some things he wants to take back, but his manner and art are still current. And although he sometimes flashes an edge of weariness, he still savors life and jest.

Middleton’s Eliot, on the other hand, needs more of a rescue mission.

If the character goes from very remote to just remote over the course of the evening, that arc is partly because of Eliot’s Anglophilic stylings. Although born in Missouri, he spoke and behaved like a refined Englishman who loved the classics. He also had an innate circumspection that, in retrospect, makes him easy to parody, if not pity.

Middleton’s performance is notable for its economy and reserve. His gait is slightly hunched as if he’s not so much walking as being carried across the stage by an invisible hanger from some haberdashery. His Eliot also surprises himself when he has feelings.

Middleton does not try to make him likable, per se, but distills a man who’s not only trapped by his limitations but also totally unaware that what he thinks is a defense against a charge sounds more like a confession.

The poet’s issues come to a head in a scene where Eliot goes on “You Bet Your Life,” which Groucho hosted. Eliot gets confronted with the things he has written about “the free-thinking Jews.”

“If you’re implying some impropriety on my part towards certain ethnicities, you’re mistaken,” Eliot tells Groucho. “My father didn’t like to do business with them, but that’s hardly my fault. If you’d known my mother, now there was an antisemite.”

When: 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends March 15.

Where: Center for Performing Arts, 3754 Pleasant Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $15-$35. 612-339-4944 or www.illusiontheater.org.