This is my first chance to see Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations onstage, though in 2007 I’d found it significant, rich and beautiful when I read it and voted to give it the American Theater Critics Association’s top award for best new regional play. I’d have to admit, therefore, that I was predisposed to want to like it but also that I already had high standards for how I wanted it performed.
Fortunately, I am familiar with the excellent past work of several in this non-Equity production, and I was delighted to find Blackfriars Theater’s opening night performance an altogether truly satisfying, first-rate bdramatic experience.
Kaufman’s plays reflect his talent as an original and thought-provoking director. His Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde seems to recreate the transcript of those trials, with side-comments by the participants, but it offers both a tragic biography of Wilde and a drama of his life which comments on the progression of the trials. Its different levels are visualized in a staging on several physical levels onstage. His The Laramie Project also offers comment on the awful murder of Matthew Shepard, its resulting trial, and the town’s reaction to it by seeming to be restricted to the interviews conducted by Kaufman’s theater group in Laramie. But the actors’ responses subtly characterize interview-subjects’ comments and stories and thus investigate the relationship between the crime and its setting.
Even when Kaufman directed a revival of Terrence McNally’s Master Class with Rita Moreno, his staging provided a kind of parallel commentary by adding a figure depicting Maria Callas in costume performing the aria that the student was singing and that Madame Callas was remembering as her recording of it played.
So this play is full of parallels suggesting parallel staging. It is about a musicologist’s obsession with exploring the evidence surrounding Beethoven’s composition of “The Diabelli Variations” -- his near-death masterpiece that expanded and redefined the musical form of Theme and Variations. She wants to discover what obsessed Beethoven with this trivial little waltz that a very unimportant contemporary musician composed.
Her question also parallels larger themes. Beethoven is shown to be obsessed with the whole concept of variations and what possibilities in the simpler original idea he can discover by exploring them: how far can mining their suggestion of varying musical value extend? Katherine, the music scholar is also hiding and trying to ignore her developing ALS condition. Beethoven tries not to admit his growing deafness. Both driven characters toward the end will struggle against death itself.
Katherine has conflicts with the daughter she is both protective of and disappointed in because Clara refuses to pursue a single talent and achieve the extraordinary. Clara fears monomania and desires constant change.
In Germany, Katherine wins over the curator of Beethoven’s papers and records, the dedicated Gertie, who is satisfied with the status of determined Beethoven data and resistant to Katherine’s desperate searching. Clara overcomes her doubts and accepts Katherine’s helpful male nurse Mike, moving toward a love affair with him.
Beethoven is arrogant in struggling to pursue his own goals, not those of his helpful assistant and biographer Anton Schindler. And Diabelli, the increasingly prosperous music publisher, agonizes comically over the endless delays in Beethoven’s finishing the variations on his waltz, but also worries about the ailing master.
Katherine’s final understanding, Beethoven’s sad triumph, deaths and achievements bring this complex, funny and often beautiful drama to a rather long-winded close. But it is inspiring and enlightening along the way. And aurally, it is literally accompanied by a pianist playing the key excerpts of the “33 Variations” to announce and define each new scene. There is leeway in the physical staging, but – as I suggested – Kaufman implies the parallelism necessary in the staging, and the plot either alternates between two eras and groups or indicates when they must interact onstage together.
Patricia Lewis dominates the play as Katherine, involving us wholly in her intellectual passion, her thrill of discovery, her vivid physical problems and her growth in human understanding. Hers is a lovely performance. With comic grouchiness but developing passion and intellectual command, Ross Amstey is winning as Beethoven in a bathrobe. Jeff Siuda is both pompous and touchingly concerned as Beethoven’s abused and loving friend and virtual servant, Anton Schindler. Vickie Casaret delightfully makes perhaps more of the wise Gertie than the script does.
Ruth Bellavia plays daughter Clara rather much in one note, but then sings gorgeously in the final requiem. Adam Petzol is strong in every way as Clara’s boyfriend and Katherine’s medical supporter, Mike. And Terry Browne is mostly comic and overbearing as Diabelli, until his controlled but touching scene when he admits not only his real concern for Beethoven but also his love for a beauty that he cannot create.
John Haldoupis directs the play with effective blocking and pacing, and his ingenious and handsome settings – mostly simple panels that slide to form complex scenes, exits and entrances -- define mood and assist movement ideally. Bravo to Ted Plant’s lighting, too.
