Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough, suggests a swirling cosmos — Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.
The man nicknamed Bucky was an iconoclastic scientist, architect, engineer, inventor, social theorist, environmentalist, and futurist from whom ideas — a geodesic dome, a three-wheeled car, a modular home that could be mass-produced and airlifted anywhere — burst forth in wild profusion for a good chunk of the 20th century.
He sought not just new ways of looking at the world, but also to persuade the world to take a big-picture look at itself, in particular its propensity for war, waste, and a misallocation of resources that leads to widespread hunger.
Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing; mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’
This is not to say, however, that every moment of “R. Buckminster Fuller’’ is scintillating. At one point, Bucky declares: “But you have to saturate yourself with information. Saturate!’’, and audiences are likely to feel over-saturated with information at times, especially when Bucky goes into eye-glazing detail about tetrahedrons and octahedrons and icosahedrons, or when he emits such lines as “Love synergetically integrates metaphysical radiation and physical gravity, whose interpulsative, intercomplentary oppositeness regenerates life.’’
I think he means that love makes the world go ’round, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.
