FROM THE AISLE: R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

I love a good lecture. I’m a sucker for exhaustive argumentation. I love visual aids and props. But, most importantly, I love it when someone can elucidate a complex topic, making it not only accessible but emotionally resonant. A good lecturer can make you understand, but, more, they can make you care.

This predilection seems appropriate when going to see R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, playing now through February 5^th at the A.R.T, as its titular figure, Bucky Fuller (Thomas Derrah, whose performance I’ll discuss below), was a master orator. He would speak for hours and hours, extending lectures until the next day, continuing on extemporaneously. The production, then, is in the form of one of Bucky’s lectures, replete with a screen, an overhead projector, a chalkboard and bits of geometric detritus.

Writer and director D.W. Jacobs created the piece completely using Bucky’s words, an amalgamation of lectures, books, essays and notes of the eccentric man. Jabobs incorporates stories of Bucky’s life, quotations he admired, theories he was known for and even a poem. A few times, Bucky bursts into song. Other times, he dances. To end the first act, Bucky suddenly announces that he has to go to the bathroom and briskly walks off stage.

All of which I imagine were part of Bucky’s real lectures. There was a sense, watching Derrah as Bucky, that we were being given, if not a mime of a Bucky lecture, an accurate interpretation of one. I believed in the authority of the text and the performance, enough to allow me to focus as much as I needed to on the content.

Well, then, what is the content? I already mentioned the anecdotes and the poems, but what is Bucky really trying to tell us?

One thing he tries to do is warn us, to try an preemptively stop the “muscle” from taking over the world and destroying “Spaceship Earth,” as he calls it. Bucky was an early advocate for environmental sustainability, and, as the real Fuller died in 1983, his warnings here strike as hauntingly prescient. He also presents the notion of “emphemeralization,” the process of doing more and more with less and less. Bucky’s famous geodesic domes, he says, are examples of this type of thinking. Often, though, capitalistic progress seems to do the opposite, doing less and less with more and more.

But, more than warn us, Bucky is interested in inspiring us. He finds true beauty in nature, in life, in humanity, and believes wholeheartedly that we have enough resources to take care of everyone, and that the mind is powerful enough to win over muscle.

Thomas Derrah’s performance is wonderful and charming, striking the right notes of intellectuality, passion and whimsy that characterized Bucky Fuller. And though the show sometimes comes off a little messy and though the production could have ultimately packed a heavier emotional punch than it did, it is always engaging, amusing and, sometimes, profound.

[R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE. 1.14.11 through 2.5.11. Loeb Drama Center. 64 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge. 617.495.2668. Begin at $25. Student rush $15. americanrepertorytheater.org]