But I was wrong about its crowd pull, at least for that night I was there. The house was sold out; I later found out that the show had been nominated for several Tony awards

I had seen Jumpers when it was first produced in the US in 1974 because it started out in Washington; and as an usher I had a chance to see it a dozen times.

Stoppard had been at every rehearsal and at almost every performance. The women ushers were extremely enthralled by him [I found him  a very nice person but thought he had rather strange and odd features and couldn't understand why the women were so breathlessly enamored of him].

In that production, which went on to New York, the leads were Brian Bedford and Jill Clayburgh; an actor called Remak Ramsey had been appearing in quite a few productions at the Kennedy center, mostly in British imports, and he had the role of Archie; I actually got to know him a little through having lunch and supper at the same time as he did in the canteen.

In this New York production the leads were actors I hadn't heard of, Simon Beale [who apparently is very famous in England] and Essie Davis, I think, English or Australian. There's a cast of about 4 or 5 actors, one of whom never speaks, and 6 or 8 acrobats. 

The simple plot is that a philandering wife [apparently] commits murder because she is unbalanced by the moon landing. The counterpoint is her husband, a university professor who is preparing a lecture on "what is or what are God?" 

But the play is really about academic and intellectual and political life and is written in brilliant witty language with sharp and unexpectedly placed insights and leaps of thought. 

Some of the lines that had stuck in my head from the past and which were jogged alert by seeing the show were: 

• No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag;
• [in a comment on physical reality] There's more to me than meets the microscope;
• [a woman commenting]: I should never have mentioned unicorns to a Freudian analyst;
• Theology and ethics, two subjects without an object.

I'm not sure if Stoppard using the title "Jumpers" is analogous to what we called "mental gymnastics" in high school: using your mind flexibly in different and unexpected directions in arithmetic or mathematics or foreign languages. And as I write this, I just realized I've unconsciously carried that forward in the verb drills I use in class.  .................. and I wonder how much  Bertrand Russell is read today?

Some of the things that struck me in comparison with the past production: there was much more nudity. In 1974 the play did open with the secretary doing a striptease on a trapeze, but the amount of nudity or technically-not-nudity-but-really-nudity of the female lead was much higher here than in the original production; and I'm not sure what more it contributed to the show.  And the acrobats in this production were presented jaded and as much more tired and sloppier than in the original production. Perhaps a commentary on how we now view academicians and politicians compared to 30 years ago?

I didn't realize how good the actors in this performance [and in the original version I saw in Washington] were until after I got back home. On the one hand, the actors are brittle, but so are the characters, something Stoppard has been criticized for. But on the other hand their acting technique was meticulously effective which is particularly important in this play.

Back home I checked the play out of the library to read it. But reading it was work. If I hadn't seen the show and known how it good it was, I would never have been able to get through reading the play. 

Reading it, the language is dense and the thoughts and ideas are complicated. When the actors performed it on stage, however, everything was fast, clear, understandable and it all fit together.