'33 Variations' at La Jolla Playhouse
THEATER REVIEW
Moisés Kaufman ponders intellectuals who embrace the beauty of the everyday.
LA JOLLA -- There's a reason why there are so few memorable works about the births of artistic masterpieces: The creative process is boring. Writers, painters and musicians dawdle interminably over details and decisions that common mortals simply don't have the patience, not to say masochism, for.
Playwright and director Moisés Kaufman ("The Laramie Project" and "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde"), however, is always up for a challenge. In his latest offering, "33 Variations" -- the divinely staged if occasionally earthbound drama that opened Sunday at La Jolla Playhouse -- he imaginatively speculates on Ludwig Van Beethoven's long and arduous composition of the curiously inspired "Diabelli Variations."
It's an intriguing dramatic premise when you consider that this revered musical oddity stemmed from an invitation put out by the wealthy music publisher Anton Diabelli to 50 Viennese composers (including Czerny, Liszt and Schubert) to write a variation on his waltz. In the play's version of events, Beethoven (played with a cartoon sketchiness by Zach Grenier) is initially not interested in the offer by Diabelli (Don Amendolia), famously dismissing the piece as a "cobbler's patch" before mysteriously taking up the task with his customary compulsive brio.
Kaufman is fascinated with the way something ordinary was transfigured into something extraordinary, an accomplishment that has been ranked with Bach's "Goldberg Variations." But he's just as eager to understand our obsession with the origins of phenomenal achievement, which is why much of the play is set in the present.
Katherine Brandt (Jayne Atkinson, in a most welcome appearance) is an American musicologist determined to write her last monograph on what is considered to be one of Beethoven's greatest piano scores. Brandt isn't nearing retirement age, but she's been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and fears that she doesn't have a lot of mobility ahead of her.
Clara (a nicely unsentimental Laura Odeh), Katherine's prickly daughter, doesn't like the idea of her mother going off to Bonn alone to do research, but she also knows there's no stopping this single-minded scholar. Their relationship is fraught, in large part because Katherine is an overachiever while Clara, a chronic career-changer currently dabbling as a costume designer, is content to sulk and drift.
