On paper, “33 Variations” sounds like a pretty good idea for a play: Beethoven was asked to write a variation on a waltz, and ended up writing not just one, but 33 variations on the theme. So a musicologist (played by Jane Fonda) goes to Bonn (home of the Beethoven archives) to try to figure out why. Only it turns out that there's not too much to tell about the writing of the variations. At least not enough to sustain a full length play. So playwright Moises Kaufman decided to give the musicologist ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). Now it's a race against time – will the musicologist figure out the secret behind Beethoven's obsession before she dies? Does anyone care? And as if in an effort to save the play from falling so low as to qualify as a Lifetime original movie, no one really seems terribly concerned that this woman is going to die. Her daughter gets one little outburst – not screaming or crying, just a bit of pouting – and other than that it seems like everyone has just accepted that she's going to die, and there's not point in worrying about what you can't control. Yeah, because that makes for exciting theatre. You know what also makes for exciting theatre? Conflict. There's lots of ground covered in the play – so much so that quite often characters just stand at the edge of the stage, tell us how they're feeling (note tell, not show) and fill us in on what's happening in their lives. So one speech may say “I was upset my mother was dying. So I went to visit her in Germany. She's had fourteen medical since I've been there. She can't feed herself anymore. And I've fallen in love with a nurse and we've moved in together. My mother made an important discovery today.” And then we get a few lines of dialogue, which feature the musicologist in her latest mobility enhancer (over the course of the second act she goes from cane, to walker, to wheelchair, to electric wheelchair, to bed – and as if to show us that she's really sick, during intermission they give her a much less flattering hairstyle. Because sick people shouldn't have good hair?). I will say that the first act is much bigger on the explanatory monologues than the second. Partly because of that, I suppose, the first act is extremely dry and choppy. It's made up of far too many short scenes, switching between mother in Bonn, daughter in New York and Beethoven in Vienna, far too often for comfort, making the audience (or at least me) feel like we're just being barraged with a whole pile of dry information about these characters that we have no reason at all to care about. The second act is a bit warmer, and does have some nice scenes – one where Beethoven walks us through the thought process behind one of the variations (while it's played in the background by a live pianist) was quite nice, though not as interesting it certainly thought it was – the combination of lighting and music and one man standing on stage declaiming just screamed “I am a brilliant scene. Come bow at my brilliance” and well, it didn't quite deserve to think so highly of itself. Still, even if we do start to care about the characters, the almost complete lack of conflict is still absolutely evident, and the play plods on to its inevitable conclusion. Why this needed to be two and a half hours, I'm not sure. I'm sure the fact that Kaufman both wrote and directed it had something to do with that. I have to assume that another directed would have done some happy hacking. It almost reminds me of Norma Desmond's “Salome” in “Sunset Boulevard,” and how she freaks out when Joe wants to cut scenes. Kaufman obviously loves to hear his writing recited out loud, hence not so much cutting. I did read somewhere that he was planning on cutting ten minutes or so between the first preview and opening night. Considering the play was two and a half, and I had read it was going to be two forty, I suppose that's already been done. Ah well. The acting is all okay, but none of the actors blew me away... I was barely getting gentle breezes out of them. I mean, this isn't “Mourning Becomes Electra” where everyone was hideously miscast – they're all fine, and they play their parts well. It's just not really a play with showy roles. I suppose the closest thing to scenery chewing we get is Zach Grenier's Beethoven, but I can't say I was really overly impressed.
What I did love, was the set, lighting and projection design. I was a little skeptical at first, but as the play went on, I was really quite impressed by the look of the piece.
Really, this just felt to me like one of those plays that should have been produced at some place like Playwright Horizons or NYTW, gone through it's limited run with maybe faint praise, and then been forgotten about. Kind of like that dull dull play Itamar Moses wrote about Bach that they did at NYTW a few years ago. Not that this is quite as boring as that one, but it's not *that* much better either. I'll file this one under “big disappointments.”
