There
just does, doesn’t there, seem to be an instant spell cast when a good
playwright takes a whack at speculative history? From the first image,
the
audience is transported and engaged in the question being posed. What
really
happened between Salieri and Mozart (Amadeus)? If a British diplomat doesn’t know
his opera
diva lover is a spy, that’s one thing; but how can he carry on an
affair for
years and not know his lover is also a man (M. Butterfly)?
The
fascination is likely primal, because all that tacitly ties into the
awe, fear
and sense of mystery most of us feel toward/about death and where it
will take
us. The insistence of religious musings aside, there is no answer to
what
awaits us (if anything!) when we pass over, so a speculative drama that
puts
forth a solution to a real mystery as yet unsolved is rather like a
pipeline to
voices from beyond the grave. It’s as if someone’s saying there are
actual
answers.
With
33 Variations,
author-director Moisés
Kaufman manages to deal
in history and death,
only here death is an implacable, merciless
clock. 21st century musicologist Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda) has become more and more fascinated
with the last work of Ludwig
von
Beethoven (Zach
Grenier), 33 variations for piano, his story
dramatized in
parallel,
intercut scenes set between 1819 and 1823. According to the diaries of his
loyal
assistant, Anton Schindler (Erik Steele), the little waltz sent him and
composed by publisher Anton Diabelli
(Don Amendolia) as
basis for
but a single solicited variation for an anthology by various composers,
was a
nothing of a piece, a trifle. So why, then, did it take over the
maestro’s life
for three years near the end? What so obsessed him that he turned away
from the
grand orchestral world shakers, like the Mass (his last one) to concentrate on
spinning out one
musical rumination after another on a simple ditty?
Brandt
travels to Bonn, to examine the Beethoven archives, where she strikes
up a
friendship with one of its curators, Gertrude Ladenburger (Susan
Kellerman), and where
the degenerative muscle disease with
which she’s been diagnosed starts to take hold. With the moral support
of her
grown daughter Clara (Samantha Mathis) and her male nurse-therapist, with
whom Clara has started a
romantic relationship, Mike (Colin Hanks), Brandt needs to solve her mystery
before death claims her. A
wholly internal puzzle, one that can only be solved via staring at old
papers
and extrapolation…and yet, still, a race against time. While in the
past,
Beethoven’s increasingly failing health threatens to stop him before he’s done with the little waltz…
It’s
not that Jane Fonda, assaying her first stage role in almost half a
century, is
a brilliant stage actress that makes her performance here such an
event; it’s
that whatever stage chops she had as a youngster, she still possesses:
she has
control, poise, authority and presence—and of course the cumulative
experience of an amazing career and background—which provide all the
needed compensations for a mid-wattage charisma and solid, though
uninspired,
character choices. Her sense of inner stillness, of inner herness, are worth the journey to see. The
rest of
the cast are in fine fettle, all roles played winningly, with standouts
being
the ubiquitous Mr. Grenier as an adorably cantankerous Beethoven; and
the
Amazonian Ms. Kellerman who gradually reveals a surprisingly spunky and
compassionate spirit within her academic martinet. And one can’t
underestimate
the contribution of pianist/musical director Diane Walsh.
Staged
simply with a minimum of artifice, Mr. Kaufman’s is a lovely little
play about
art and life and love—and sacrifice: of comfort for art, of health for
knowledge, of home for family, of consequences for friendship—the
small,
intimate resonances go on and on. And then there’s the solution to that
mystery. Which turns out to be small and intimate too. Yet as perfect
and
satisfying as—forgive me, I have to put it this way—a content,
post-coital sigh.
This
is a play that’s going to be around a while (despite the limited
engagement notice: Jane Fonda may leave, but in a role such as this, a
star can always be replaced); it tells a story that intrigues
its audience, it provides roles that challenge and showcase its actors,
and
it’s well-tuned to the music of life. I, who know better than to make
commercial predictions, predict a three-year run. One for every 11
variations…
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