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THEATER REVIEW | '33 VARIATIONS'
Beethoven and Fonda: Broadway Soul Mates
It’s a fine line between brittle and breakable. Jane Fonda blurs that distinction to memorable effect in “33 Variations,” the new drama written and directed by Moisés Kaufman that opened on Monday night at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. Playing a sharp-witted, terminally ill musicologist
confronting the betrayal of her body, Ms. Fonda exudes an aura of
beleaguered briskness that flirts poignantly with the ghost of her
spiky, confrontational screen presence as a young woman.
Ms.
Fonda’s layered crispness is, I regret to add, a contrast to Mr.
Kaufman’s often soggy play, which sends her character on a quest to
unlock, with a mortal deadline looming before her, a musical mystery
about the Beethoven composition of the title. Still, I’m willing to forgive a fair amount
in a production that returns Ms. Fonda with such gallantry to the
Broadway stage after an absence of 46 years.
Ms. Fonda, 71, is
surely nervous about performing for a live audience after decades of
working mostly in front of cameras, followed by years of semiretirement
from acting. After all, younger stars of comparable renown have
sputtered and flamed out on Broadway in recent years. But it is to Ms.
Fonda’s advantage that she is playing someone who, used to being in
unconditional charge of her life, is suddenly faced with the prospect
of losing control.
Whatever discomfort the actress may feel melds
into her portrayal of Dr. Katherine Brandt, whose naturally assertive
nature is humbled by the progressive, atrophying illness known as Lou
Gehrig’s disease. Ms. Fonda became one of the great film actresses of
her generation playing characters with the defense systems of a
porcupine — all quivering, lancing quills — in films like “They Shoot
Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Klute” (1971).
In “33
Variations,” Katherine is being ruthlessly denuded of her defenses, and
for those who grew up enthralled with Ms. Fonda’s screen image, it’s
hard not to respond to her performance here, on some level, as a
personal memento mori.
Given the resonance of its star’s presence
— and a plot that sets a fraught mother-daughter relationship to late
music by Beethoven — “33 Variations” should be more moving as a whole
than it is. Mr. Kaufman evidently hoped to create a sort of
cultural-metaphysical detective story, somewhere between the
biographical psychodrama of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the
time-traveling, serious playfulness of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.”
But
here Mr. Kaufman lacks the brazen theatrical flair of Mr. Shaffer and
the cerebral deftness of Mr. Stoppard, offering instead much canned
sentimental dialogue about self-knowledge and self-acceptance. For a
show about transcendence through music, “33 Variations” can often feel
oddly tone-deaf.
The play takes its shape from Beethoven’s
“Diabelli” Variations, a piano work that riffs daringly and expansively
on a seemingly pedestrian waltz written by the Viennese music publisher
Anton Diabelli. Katherine, who has recently received the diagnosis of
the disease that will kill her, is determined to discover what inspired
Beethoven to devote so much of his talent late in life to a piece he at
first dismissed as “a cobbler’s patch.”
The play — which features
a handsome, multipurpose archives-of-the-mind set by Derek McLane —
moves between past and present, as Katherine pursues her sleuthing
among a collection of manuscripts in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn,
Germany.
Scenes showing the contentious personal and professional
relationships in her life are presented in counterpoint with vignettes
in which Beethoven (Zach Grenier, who looks just like those faux-marble
busts on pianos) struggles in grand genius style with his failing
health, his deafness, his poverty and his music. Throughout we hear
relevant fragments of the variations, expertly performed on the piano
by Diane Walsh, who does admirable double duty as the show’s musical
director.
Mr. Kaufman’s script impressively and unobtrusively
makes musicology accessible to the uninitiated without professorial
condescension. Intellectually, the parallels between past and present —
as well as the parallel courses of Katherine’s academic and personal
paths to knowledge — make sense. But you only rarely feel the essential
organic connection among these elements.
Part of the problem is
that for someone who has supposedly spent years in deep study of
Beethoven, Katherine comes across as a rather unsophisticated scholar.
(“I didn’t know he loved soup,” she says to Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger,
the woman who oversees the Beethoven archives, played with appealing
robustness by Susan Kellermann.)
And in examining rare sketches
and conversation books by Beethoven, Ms. Fonda’s Katherine seems more
polite than passionate. This is one instance in which the cinematic
restraint of Ms. Fonda’s performance works against her. It’s hard to
credit the words Katherine remembers her 7-year-old daughter saying to
her: “When you listen to music, Mom, you look like you’re talking to
God.”
Original dialogue is not the strong suit of Mr. Kaufman,
whose best-known previous work has mostly involved the artful
arrangement of transcribed interviews (in “The Laramie Project,” about
the impact of the murder of Matthew Shepard) and archival material (in the superb “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”).
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the scenes with Beethoven, his
much put-upon secretary (Erik Steele) and Diabelli (Don Amendolia) feel
(marginally) less clunky than many of the contemporary scenes.
The script is particularly grating in portraying the emotional thawing of Katherine and her daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis),
who has serious commitment issues, both professionally and personally.
(Clara to Katherine: “I finally see how you see me, Mom. And it’s
horrible.” Gertrude to Katherine, about Clara: “She sees her mother.
It’s you who cannot see your daughter.”) And the sequences showing the
courtship of Clara by Mike Clark (the charming Colin Hanks) are as
stale as 1950s B-movie romance.
While Mr. Kaufman is to be
commended for holding back on the schmaltz in his use of Beethoven’s
music, there are remarkably few cases of that music’s stirring your
heart here. The most affecting of these moments find Mr. Grenier’s
Beethoven working through the composition of Variation 32 amid much
psycho-sturm und drang and, especially, a hospital sequence in which
the “Kyrie eleison” is heard.
Ms. Fonda herself sings in that
scene, in a voice that is heartbreaking in its reedy frailness. By
then, Katherine’s illness has advanced to the point where her tongue
twitches, and she cannot feed herself.
Yet as Ms. Fonda plays
her, you still sense the rigidity of Katherine’s will. Her elegantly
restrained rendering of a struggle between fierce human consciousness
and mortal decay comes close to matching “the notes ascending — a
rising promise” that Katherine says she hears in Beethoven’s music.
33 VARIATIONS
Written and directed by Moisés Kaufman; music by Beethoven;
sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Janice Pytel; lighting by David
Lander; sound by André J. Pluess; projection design by Jeff Sugg;
choreography by Daniel Pelzig; dramaturgy by Mark Bly; production stage
manager, Linda Marvel; production manager, Juniper Street Productions;
general manager, 101 Productions Ltd; associate producer, Paula Herold.
A Tectonic Theater Project (Greg Reiner, executive director; Dominick
Balletta, general manager; Jeffrey LaHoste, senior producer). Presented
by David Binder, Ruth Hendel, Barbara Whitman, Goldberg/Mills, Latitude
Link, Arielle Tepper Madover, Bill Resnick,Eric Schnall, Jayne Baron
Sherman, Willis/True Love Productions; managing director, Eric Schnall.
At the Eugene O’Neill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. Through May 24. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Jane Fonda (Dr. Katherine Brandt), Samantha Mathis (Clara Brandt), Colin Hanks (Mike Clark), Zach Grenier (Ludwig van
Beethoven), Don Amendolia (Anton Diabelli), Susan Kellermann (Dr.
Gertrude Ladenburger), Erik Steele (Anton Schindler) and Diane Walsh
(Pianist/Musical Director).