Time Travel.(the plays '33 Variations' and 'Blithe Spirit')(Theater review)

In 1819, Ludwig van Beethoven, along with some fifty other composers, was asked to write a variation to an undistinguished waltz composed by his publisher, Anton Diabelli. Four years and forty ducats later, he produced Opus 120, not one but thirty-three variations on the waltz, in which he revolutionized the variation form. "33 Variations" (written and directed by Moises Kaufman, at the Eugene O'Neill) is a musicology lecture disguised as an intellectual detective story within an emotional melodrama. "I need to know what he saw in this waltz," says the play's dogged shamus, Dr. Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda), a classical-music scholar who is in a race to finish her monograph before she succumbs to a motor-neuron disease. Did Beethoven do it for cash? For the fun of teasing the mediocrity of his publisher? For the glory of one-upping J. S. Bach and his thirty-two Goldberg Variations? Or, as seems more likely, did Beethoven hear, in the earthiness of the German dance, a chance to demonstrate through his virtuosity how the commonplace can yield both metaphysical exploration and radical transformation? Or are all these questions just palaver, drummed up so that Kaufman can provide Beethoven with a commercial Broadway show?

Kaufman's passion for the music is what drives "33 Variations," a play that is more about time and rhythm than about characterization, in which narrative motifs are orchestrated to mimic the trajectory of Beethoven's music from the apparently trivial to the transfigured. Kaufman's scenes may be clumsy, but the interplay between lights, projections, and set and the stories of Beethoven and Brandt is elegant. A concert Steinway (well played by Diane Walsh, whose CD of the Diabelli Variations was selling briskly in the lobby the night I was there) stands beside Derek McLane's beautifully designed proscenium stage, which re-creates the well-lit shelves and gray manuscript boxes of Beethoven's archive in Bonn. Kaufman's characters are stick figures, but the projections he displays of Beethoven's fierce, blunt musical notations, often gouged into the paper, impose a weightier biographical reality on the events. The hieroglyphic splatter of these markings gives the show a visceral subliminal power. At one point, the archive librarian, Gertie (Susan Kellermann), who befriends Brandt, explains how Beethoven worked. "He wrote first in pencil," she says, "and when he was sure, he went back over it with ink and highlighted the parts he liked." She pushes a button for infrared light, and a specially lit sketch appears. Gertie continues, "You see how it turns blue? The bright white is the ink. These are the parts he chose to keep in the piece." The topography of Beethoven's creative imagination--with its false starts and its discoveries--is spread out before us: a revelation, a sensation, and pure theatrical magic.

The excitement of Beethoven's visionary genius doesn't extend to Kaufman's plot, however, whose simplistic shorthand is more televisionary. Beethoven (Zach Grenier) and Brandt are both isolated by an obsession with excellence; both are physically declining; both struggle against time to finish their endeavors; both stories begin with the mundane--a waltz, a doctor's waiting room--and end with an extraordinary leap into the unknown. The play marks Fonda's return to the Broadway stage after forty-six years, but the role is no test of her emotional range. Her presence--with its curious amalgam of alertness and standoffishness--is a neat bit of typecasting; Fonda provides a sort of scaffolding of willpower and disdain that props up the ambitious Brandt. "You can't excel at anything if you keep changing careers," Brandt tells her dutiful daughter, Clara (Samantha Mathis), a professional costume designer who is flirting with stage design. "You'll always be mediocre at everything." The froideur between mother and daughter is indicated, stated, even resolved at the finale, but never dramatized. There is no scene in which Brandt reveals herself to her daughter or in which her daughter is appropriately revealed to her. With so much left unexplored in the text, the actors inevitably fall back on their own personalities. In the romantic ...