The literary comedy Travesties (at the American Airlines Theatre through June 17) gives us Tom Stoppard in clover: frolicsome, intellectually gluttonous, a bit undisciplined, but showering delights in every direction. Stoppard has written many fine plays—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Jumpers (1972), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993)—and a first-rate production of any of them is not to be missed. Others who have been called the best playwright of this generation, such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, can’t match Stoppard’s breadth or depth, but it’s more important to note that they can’t match his spirit, his verve, his firehouse gush of themes. The essence of Stoppard is surface frivolity that decorates and masks a seriousness of purpose. In theater, the reverse is much more often the case. Stoppard writes plays that are blithe yet consequential; some of the most acclaimed playwrights of the last century are operose yet laughable.

Stoppard’s sense of priorities, too, is a reversal of the usual norm. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he never lost sight of the central intellectual, cultural, and political scourge of his lifetime, which was communism. He once said, “I don’t lose any sleep if a policeman in Durham beats somebody up, because I know it’s an exceptional case. It’s a sheer perversion of speech to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged. What worries me is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm.” Yet policeman-in-Durham-beats-somebody-up might be said