In Search of Lost Times.(Theater review)

Mrs. K. (Elizabeth Franz) is an elderly widow whose powerful, selective memory is cluttered to the rafters. And since she is, for the most part, the central force in Julia Cho's well-written "The Piano Teacher" (at the Vineyard), we have to take her word for almost everything--at first. This isn't terribly difficult to do, given that Mrs. K. has such a lovely, seductive voice: it sounds like a flute floating above the babbling brook of her various reminiscences.

Sporting a pink cardigan and sensible shoes, Mrs. K. pads around her doll-delicate parlor. She doesn't have much to do, now that her husband has gone on to his glory, and she no longer offers the piano lessons that kept her occupied for a time. Munching on cookies or chocolates, watching TV, and chatting with the audience are the amiable Mrs. K.'s pastimes now. "People assume I must eat like a horse," she says near the start of the play. But she's being a little disingenuous--she's as slight as a wren. Mrs. K. adds, "Everything I eat becomes quite attached to me, so that even if all I eat is a very small piece of chocolate, well, then, that little piece of chocolate will stay with me, become part of me."

This is one of Cho's more inventive metaphors. Mrs. K. can't let anything out, not even the truth. Still, something within her--perhaps it's the sound of silence, of loneliness, that pervades her house--compels her to reach out to her former students. They're all she has, and perhaps has ever had, in this life. Naturally, the majority of them don't remember her right away; the years make strangers of us all. But Mrs. K. chirps on whenever she gets her students on the line. "You still play?" she asks. "Do you remember me?"

The director, Kate Whoriskey, does a clean, credible job when it comes to staging the telephone exchanges between Mrs. K. and her students. She does a good job, too, of minimizing the effect of the Tony Award-winning Franz's mannerisms--like many actors who don't have to share the stage much, Franz has a tendency to use her tics as a kind of armor against the audience. Whoriskey, however, draws her out at every turn, and, in response, Franz offers up a bravura performance.

And yet one can't help wondering at times why this play exists at all. While Mrs. K. is eventually forced to listen to a former student named Michael (very well played by the lyrical John Boyd), who shows up at her house one day and imparts certain truths about Mrs. K.'s husband, the drama and its revelations feel incidental, a relay race that chooses its own finish line. Nevertheless, it's during the exchange with Michael that we begin to see not only that Mrs. K.'s life has been shaped by lies but that those lies form the bedrock of her reality. This is not a new idea. And Mrs. K. is not a character we've never met before. In Truman Capote's 1945 story "Miriam," a young girl named Miriam visits a middle-aged woman who bears the same name and similarly assaults her with truths. By the end of the story, we are made to understand that both Miriams are one and the same. Are Mrs. K.'s students just different aspects of her solipsistic self? Other voices in other rooms in her empty house, which she's too frightened to explore? Cho doesn't answer these questions, nor should she. "The Piano Teacher," with its gothic mysteries, finds its triumph, finally, in dramatizing the unknown.

The Waiting Woman, in the writer and director Richard Maxwell's new, seventy-five-minute piece, "Ode to the Man Who Kneels" (at the Performing Garage), wears a long dark skirt with a high waistband that befits her role as a female living in the American West during the nineteenth century. Her current beau is the Dashing Man (Brian Mendes). Although the Waiting Woman (Anna Kohler) calls him an "idiot," he will not go away; his continuing presence is a testament to her charm. Whenever he gets tired of the violence in his life, he lays his heavy head on her lap and she strokes his hair lovingly. That kind of comfort is beyond language, as tender as a sigh. But, in the world that Maxwell has created ...