Sunday 7 February 2016

Variations on the Theme of Life

Theatre Sarnia's production of the play 33 Variations by Moises Kaufman successfully surmounted the technical, dramatic, and musical challenges of a most unusual script.

33 Variations, which was originally staged on Broadway in 2009, takes its place in an illustrious line of plays that totally subvert our conventional linear understanding of time.  Kaufman's complex script attempts to tell the intertwined stories of three characters, in three different settings, in two different centuries, and in the process allows the audience to draw all kinds of intriguing parallels among the various characters.

Any person with a sizable knowledge of classical music would already infer from the title (correctly) that one of the characters involved is Beethoven.  The title of course refers to his largest masterpiece for the piano, the 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, a work which itself takes most of an hour to play completely through.  It's also one of the most fiendish piano works ever written. 

The four "modern" characters in the play are musicologist Dr. Katherine Brandt, her daughter Clara, the nurse Mike Clark who becomes Clara's boyfriend, and the Beethoven archivist Dr. Gertie Ladenburger.  Moving around and between these four are Beethoven himself, his secretary and assistant Anton Schindler, and the publisher Anton Diabelli -- the composer of the waltz that started it all.  Behind them all, on the highest level of the stage sits the pianist.

This story allows us to watch as different people cope with their own personal obsessions, with their own deepest needs, as they confront their own impending deaths.  In a very real sense, Diabelli's cute little beer-hall dance tune is the mainspring that drives all the action.  I put it that way because Katherine's obsession is her desire to penetrate the secret of why Beethoven spent so much time in his final years composing these monumental variations on such an -- apparently -- trivial theme.  Meanwhile, Beethoven's obsession remains his need to tease out every last little bit of musical development and growth contained and implied in that simple dance tune.

The first and biggest challenge this play flings at the producing company is the challenge of finding a pianist who can successfully tame this diabolically complex music, not just playing the notes but dropping into and out of variations, out of their numerical order, on the turn of a dime.  Dan Sonier more than met the challenge and I was only sorry that a proper acoustic concert grand piano hadn't been found to better highlight his fine playing. 

Right behind that comes the need to create a performing space which will allow the scenes to flow and intercut as they must.  Jen Paquette's design consisted of a simple arrangement of risers leading up through several performing levels to the top level where the piano was placed.  Immediately by the pianist was a small desk used to contain and hold Beethoven's manuscript notes for the Variations.  This important placement ensured that the music, written and played, did indeed act as the focal point and mainspring of all the dramatic action.

Above the risers hung a series of projection screens which were used to create subtle backdrops in various scenes.  This technical device was handled sensitively so that it always supported the stage action, never (as can sometimes happen) becoming an end in itself.

Recorded music (by Beethoven of course!) supplied the introductory material before each act and also occasional bridge material within acts.  Sound levels were fine throughout.  The one serious error came when Diabelli picked up the score of the Mass which Beethoven had just given him, and the Gloria in excelsis Deo sounded through the theatre.  But it was the wrong Gloria.  I didn't recognize it off hand, but it definitely was not the Gloria of the Missa Solemnis, the work Beethoven was occupied with at the same time as the Ninth Symphony and the Variations.  And it should have been.  The volcanic opening of the Missa Solemnis Gloria would give Diabelli something even better to play against.

Much of the comedy in the play (and there are many fine comic moments) is supplied by the three characters in nineteenth-century Vienna.  The publisher, Diabelli, was played by Ralph D'Alessandro as a congenial fellow with an enormous appetite for money and recognition hidden under the surface.  The congeniality on his face was often contradicted by the greed in his voice.  The need for recognition was apparent every time he mentioned "my waltz".  Very effective.

Shane Davis maintained the immobile expression suited to a servant or bureaucrat in the role of Schindler.  The scenes in which he stonewalled Diabelli were a delight.  Without actually doing anything so blatant, he also gave the impression that he was tiptoeing whenever Beethoven was actually present.  This air of caution underlined the volcanic temperament of the Master, as Schindler usually described him.

Beethoven himself was presented by Trevor Morris as a man not so much driving but driven.   The dishevelled hair and clothes, the sudden outbursts, the swerves of temperament, all became the signs that he simply had to seize Diabelli's waltz by the scruff of the neck and shake the music out that was hiding inside it.  Vocally and physically, a commanding performance as one of music history's most commanding personalities.

When it comes to the modern scenes, we hit the one serious weakness in Kaufman's otherwise admirable script.  The scenes showing the early stages of the Clara-Mike relationship are downright painful, as written -- barely one step, if that, away from the sketch comedy world of Mad TV.  The social ineptness of these two characters -- especially of Mike -- is so heavily underlined by the writing that it doesn't leave a lot of room for the actors to play any other aspects at all.  What was plainly intended as comic relief from the play's serious side became more an embarrassment than an amusement.

The scene where the two attend a classical concert together is a very clever piece of writing (David Ives springs to mind as a reference point).  It would make a fun comic sketch on its own.  In this setting, though, it actually took attention away from the performers by drawing attention to the writer's own cleverness in constructing it.  Or so I felt.

Having said that, Darryl Heater as Mike Clark did his best with a difficult situation.  His scenes in the second act allowed him to appear as a much more rounded, believably human character and here he did his best work.

Claire Ross gave a touching performance as Clara Brandt.  I understood and totally related to her desire to experiment and try different things in life, not settling into one single specialty.  Although exasperation was her keynote in her scenes with her mother, that exasperation came across as the inevitable result of the clash of two such wildly different personalities.

At the centre of the story is the character of Dr. Katherine Brandt.  She is the other driven person in the play, driven by her need to figure out the mindset of Beethoven in composing the Variations, but also driven by the need to come to terms with her impending demise due to ALS.  Audrey Hummelen gave a masterly performance of this complex and sometimes thorny character.  Her first scenes could be called "33 Variations on the Theme of Denial", a theme which she elaborated in all sorts of subtle touches of face, voice, and movement.

When she arrives at the Beethoven archives in Bonn, Germany, she meets the archivist, Dr. Gertie Ladenburger (played by Andrea Hughes Coleman).  At first, Gertie is a forbidding, almost stereotypical "Librarian" figure.  Significantly, though, it is to Gertie that Katherine is talking when she first admits that she has ALS.  From that point on, the two women stop fencing and a growing friendship between them provides all sorts of opportunities for both of them to express more sides of their characters.  This can't be done blatantly, but when done right (as with Hummelen and Coleman) the later scenes between the two become like a series of musical duets.  When Clara and Mike also arrive in Bonn, the four of them become a team, all contributing their efforts to help Katherine finish her work.

Inevitably, the disease takes its toll, and here Hummelen produced her strongest work.  Without ever pushing the "Pity" button overtly, she continued to struggle and adapt most believably as her workable world shrank from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair to a hospital bed.  A virtuoso performance of a truly difficult but very rich role.

I want to commend two remarkable ensemble moments in the show.  One of the most challenging scenes in the play is at the end of Act One.  It's a scene in which all the characters are on stage at once, in New York, Bonn, and in 1823 Vienna.  All seven are speaking across each other, sometimes alternately, sometimes simultaneously, occasionally coalescing onto a unison phrase spoken by three or more at the same time.  This passage is the greatest example in the script of a scene which needs to be very carefully orchestrated and structured -- and it most certainly was.

Even more moving was the moment near the end of the piece when all seven characters, one by one, joined in singing the Kyrie eleison from the Missa Solemnis.  It was a quiet, gentle moment with the seven each lost in their own thoughts wherever they happened to be on the stage.  This was not the performance of a trained choir but a more personal, inward kind of singing.  And the beauty of it was heartbreaking in its simplicity.

As the director of this very complex piece, Henri Canino orchestrated the entire performance with a certainty of tone and a lightness of touch that were altogether remarkable.  Examples of this are too numerous to mention.  I was particularly taken with how well she led her cast in managing to minimize the weaknesses in the script as well as making the most of its strengths.  The result was a tightly integrated performance in which every element, every line, every sound, every action fitted into the overall picture.

I would have been quite happy to take a 30-minute stretch break, and then go back into the theatre and watch the entire show again.  I'm sure I would have caught many more details that I missed on the first go-round.

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