At 21, Jon Marans thought he had the world all figured out. But that changed when, in 1978, he spent several months studying music in Austria.
A Viennese teacher friend made an anti-Semitic comment--and thought nothing of it. So many bomb threats were made against the local synagogue that people were frisked at the door. And, during a trip across the border to Germany, Marans noticed that most traces of the concentration camp at Dachau had been covered over. Erased. The place looked like a park.
"I fell in love with Vienna," he recalls, but "then I discovered a second layer.
"Growing up, I had never come across anti-Semitism," says Marans, who is Jewish and grew up in Silver Spring, Md. A cloud passes over his face as he recalls those moments of lost innocence.
"It was a turning point," he says. "It was one of those moments that informs the rest of your life. That was the first time I realized that there are so many layers, and you have to really look at things to even begin to understand what's really going on."
Nineteen years later, he is passing his epiphany along in "Old Wicked Songs," his play about an aging Viennese voice teacher and a young American piano prodigy who are haunted in different ways by the Holocaust, as well as by personal history. An off-Broadway hit at the Promenade Theatre and a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, it opens Wednesday atthe Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. Director Seth Barrish and the Promenade cast--Justin Kirk of the Broadway and film versions of "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and Hal Robinson, recently seen at the Mark Taper Forum in "Nine Armenians"--have reprised their work in Westwood.
While history divides the characters in "Old Wicked Songs," music brings them together--specifically, Robert Alexander Schumann's "Dichterliebe," a haunting cycle of songs about innocence lost and forgiveness found. The songs quite literally set the tone for the men's actions.
When Marans began writing the play in 1988, he had his actor friend David Pierce in mind to play the student. But by the time the play premiered in Philadelphia in 1995, Pierce had become David Hyde Pierce and was preoccupied with the television show "Frasier."
"I'm sorry I never got the chance" to play the role, Pierce said in a recent telephone interview, "because it would have been a wonderful role to tackle--and it would have given me an excuse to learn all that Schumann."
Pierce studied the "Dichterliebe" in a college music theory class, and he marvels at the way Marans has been able to "expand an audience's understanding of the play through the music and, at the same time, without condescending to the audience, expand its understanding of the music through the play."
After all, he jokes, "You don't think of that piece of music and think, 'Gee, it would be good if only it had a play attached to it.' "
Visiting Westwood to observe rehearsals, Marans, who lives in New York, speaks guardedly at first, wary of revealing too much about himself or the plot of his play. Gradually, though, he relaxes. Tentativeness gives way to earnestness and shy smiles light his boyish face.
Marans studied the "Dichterliebe" while in Vienna, and he uses his knowledge of its style--lieder songs--to help explain his play.
"Lieder--and especially Schumann lieder--are really duets," Marans says. "The piano has become a partner to the voice. There has to be this partnership, and you can't have this partnership unless there is this trust and this opening up of feelings."
Professor Josef Mashkan, the teacher in Marans' story, is a brilliant instructor on the skids. Stephen Hoffman, the student, is a headstrong 25-year-old piano prodigy who's trying to work through a performing block that has kept him offstage for a year. He's studying with Mashkan at a more famous teacher's insistence.
The men clash over almost everything, from performing styles to politics (it's 1986, and Austria is about to elect Kurt Waldheim as president, despite his Nazi past). But in the music, Mashkan and Hoffman learn how to work together--how to take the lead for awhile and then give it back in a joyous sharing of power and creativity.
The younger artist hears himself echoed back in the older artist, though in a slightly different way--filtered through all those added years of experience. This too echoes what's going on in the "Dichterliebe" between Heinrich Heine, who wrote the poems on which it is based, and Schumann.
Heine wrote his poems about a young man's disappointment in love when he was about 20 years old, Marans says, "so they have this young, angry man's passion. Schumann wrote the music when he was in his 30s, with a much more knowing quality.
"The whole song cycle is incredibly layered. The lyric does one thing and the music does something else. The words are, 'I bear no grudge,' but the music is, 'I bear no grudge,' " he repeats with anger in his voice. "So you know this man is absolutely furious."
