In Israela Margalit's Trio, which just opened at Hollywood's Lounge Theatre, and Jonas Oppenheim's interactive satire Free $$$, at Sacred Fools Theater on Hollywood's eastern edge, love is on the rocks.
PHOTO BY ED KRIEGER
The waltz of adultery, in Trio
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The former concerns a supremely talented, real-life married couple, pianist-composers Clara and Robert Schumann (Meghan Maureen McDonough and Bjorn Johnson). But even a Geiger counter couldn't locate the talent in the latter's power duo, Robin and Randy Petraeus (Jocelyn Towne and Tim Hamelen), who, in writer-director Oppenheim's Free $$$, offer their workshop: "How to MANIFEST YOUR DREAMS on ZERO DOLLARS A DAY ... or YOUR MONEY BACK — guaranteed!"
This is a couple that has blown all its credit and lives out of a car, and its history includes her cuckolding him, night after night, in exchange for a place for them both to sleep in the apartment of a "friend." And yet they're still together, here, with us, with the self-proclaimed authority of the self-help book that they're trying to hawk, and, of course, the wisdom accrued from their many, many errors of judgment.
The question for us to fathom in Free $$$ is whether we're to trust people whose actual success we can verify and emulate, or whether we're to invest in the alternative theory that truly wise people have learned from their mistakes, and therefore are worth believing. This really isn't a contest, and that Oppenheim's power couple is so transparently useless and, by design, bereft of credibility is both the source of the satire and, paradoxically, the very reason for us to disengage. To a point. Because there's something much larger and more vital going on here than a vicious parody of losers. More on that in a moment.
Margalit's history play about the personal lives of the Schumanns premiered at Moscow's Sovremennik Theatre before touring throughout Russia and Ukraine for five years. Margalit is herself an acclaimed concert pianist, as well as a television writer.
"The challenge," she said in a March 8 online interview, "was how to bring their past into the play without exposition. For my taste, exposition in a play is like a voice-over in a movie — it's a writing cop-out and an insult to the intelligence of the audience."
This is an interesting quotation, because of the constricted TV taste it reveals: In some movies and plays, voice-overs are very effective. What would documentaries be without voice-overs, or even a film like Liev Schreiber's 2005 Everything Is Illuminated, in which the wry narration is one of the engines? If the expository narration were deleted from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the work would be diminished. If you did the same in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, there would be nothing left.
It's doubly interesting because Margalit's Trio, presented in director Rick Sparks' mostly naturalistic production, is exactly the kind of kitchen-sink drama in which the exposition Margalit decries arrives so thuddingly. Here we have Clara and Robert Schumann rehashing their personal histories, which we may need in order to understand the plot, but which they already know, and therefore have little reason to reiterate to each other.
But that's a minor complaint, given the scale of problems here.
We've had a number of plays roll through recently about classical musicians, and how the pettiness of their personal lives contrasts with the glory of the music they create: Last year at the Fountain Theatre was Opus, by Michael Hollinger, about a string quartet whose members can barely endure each other's company. Earlier this year, Moisés Kaufman's 33 Variations at the Ahmanson took on Peter Shaffer's theory in Amadeus that God had bestowed His greatest gifts on a godless, sex-obsessed, self-centered, scatological man-child named Mozart, while cursing with mediocrity the devout composer who understood this. Kaufman's play counter-argues that only the mediocre wrongfully condemn mediocrity, and that a genius such as Beethoven could recognize the transcendent qualities in a melody dismissed by lesser minds as insignificant.
In these productions, the composers' personal lives led to bigger ideas that matched the grandeur of the music — even the ideas about personal malice and jealousy were roped to the heavens. The direction reflected that scale, mostly through abstraction. At the tiny Fountain, Frederica Nascimento's constructivist set allowed Opus to breathe and then to soar. At the Ahmanson, scenic designer Derek McLane and projection designer Jeff Sugg crashed open the walls of the claustrophobic garret in which Beethoven lived and worked.
Not so Joel Daavid's realistically detailed set in Trio, whose aim is to toy with one of the unanswered questions of classical music history: Did Johannes Brahms (a callow performance by Jeremy Shranko, personified by a conspicuously faux magnanimity) engage in a mere friendship or consummate an affair with Clara Schumann, while her husband was going bonkers in the loony bin? Daavid's is an opulent television set for the aging Schumanns and Brahms, their young protégé, to play out a love triangle. The play's tinkering with infidelity, Robert's oppression of his brilliant wife (forget the concert tours, dear; stay home and care for our eight children, while I sit here and bemoan my waning powers) and his subsequent descent into madness get compressed by the setting into a tendentious episode of Masterpiece Theatre. These are ideas that need to be pulled out from the play, not smashed further into it. The tinny quality of the music doesn't help.
