Jane Fonda on Broadway

[Reza]

NY Times

March 10, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | '33 VARIATIONS'


Beethoven and Fonda: Broadway Soul Mates
By BEN BRANTLEY

It’s a fine line between brittle and breakable. Jane Fonda blurs that distinction to memorable effect in “33 Variations,” the new drama written and directed by Moisés Kaufman that opened on Monday night at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. Playing a sharp-witted, terminally ill musicologist confronting the betrayal of her body, Ms. Fonda exudes an aura of beleaguered briskness that flirts poignantly with the ghost of her spiky, confrontational screen presence as a young woman.

Ms. Fonda’s layered crispness is, I regret to add, a contrast to Mr. Kaufman’s often soggy play, which sends her character on a quest to unlock, with a mortal deadline looming before her, a musical mystery about the Beethoven composition of the title. Still, I’m willing to forgive a fair amount in a production that returns Ms. Fonda with such gallantry to the Broadway stage after an absence of 46 years.

Ms. Fonda, 71, is surely nervous about performing for a live audience after decades of working mostly in front of cameras, followed by years of semiretirement from acting. After all, younger stars of comparable renown have sputtered and flamed out on Broadway in recent years. But it is to Ms. Fonda’s advantage that she is playing someone who, used to being in unconditional charge of her life, is suddenly faced with the prospect of losing control.

Whatever discomfort the actress may feel melds into her portrayal of Dr. Katherine Brandt, whose naturally assertive nature is humbled by the progressive, atrophying illness known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Ms. Fonda became one of the great film actresses of her generation playing characters with the defense systems of a porcupine ­ all quivering, lancing quills ­ in films like “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Klute” (1971).

In “33 Variations,” Katherine is being ruthlessly denuded of her defenses, and for those who grew up enthralled with Ms. Fonda’s screen image, it’s hard not to respond to her performance here, on some level, as a personal memento mori.

Given the resonance of its star’s presence ­ and a plot that sets a fraught mother-daughter relationship to late music by Beethoven ­ “33 Variations” should be more moving as a whole than it is. Mr. Kaufman evidently hoped to create a sort of cultural-metaphysical detective story, somewhere between the biographical psychodrama of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the time-traveling, serious playfulness of Tom Stoppard ’s “Arcadia.”

But here Mr. Kaufman lacks the brazen theatrical flair of Mr. Shaffer and the cerebral deftness of Mr. Stoppard, offering instead much canned sentimental dialogue about self-knowledge and self-acceptance. For a show about transcendence through music, “33 Variations” can often feel oddly tone-deaf.

The play takes its shape from Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, a piano work that riffs daringly and expansively on a seemingly pedestrian waltz written by the Viennese music publisher Anton Diabelli. Katherine, who has recently received the diagnosis of the disease that will kill her, is determined to discover what inspired Beethoven to devote so much of his talent late in life to a piece he at first dismissed as “a cobbler’s patch.”

The play ­ which features a handsome, multipurpose archives-of-the-mind set by Derek McLane ­ moves between past and present, as Katherine pursues her sleuthing among a collection of manuscripts in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany.

Scenes showing the contentious personal and professional relationships in her life are presented in counterpoint with vignettes in which Beethoven (Zach Grenier, who looks just like those faux-marble busts on pianos) struggles in grand genius style with his failing health, his deafness, his poverty and his music. Throughout we hear relevant fragments of the variations, expertly performed on the piano by Diane Walsh, who does admirable double duty as the show’s musical director.

Mr. Kaufman’s script impressively and unobtrusively makes musicology accessible to the uninitiated without professorial condescension. Intellectually, the parallels between past and present ­ as well as the parallel courses of Katherine’s academic and personal paths to knowledge ­ make sense. But you only rarely feel the essential organic connection among these elements.

Part of the problem is that for someone who has supposedly spent years in deep study of Beethoven, Katherine comes across as a rather unsophisticated scholar. (“I didn’t know he loved soup,” she says to Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger, the woman who oversees the Beethoven archives, played with appealing robustness by Susan Kellermann.)

And in examining rare sketches and conversation books by Beethoven, Ms. Fonda’s Katherine seems more polite than passionate. This is one instance in which the cinematic restraint of Ms. Fonda’s performance works against her. It’s hard to credit the words Katherine remembers her 7-year-old daughter saying to her: “When you listen to music, Mom, you look like you’re talking to God.”

Original dialogue is not the strong suit of Mr. Kaufman, whose best-known previous work has mostly involved the artful arrangement of transcribed interviews (in “The Laramie Project,” about the impact of the murder of Matthew Shepard ) and archival material (in the superb “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde ”). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the scenes with Beethoven, his much put-upon secretary (Erik Steele) and Diabelli (Don Amendolia) feel (marginally) less clunky than many of the contemporary scenes.

The script is particularly grating in portraying the emotional thawing of Katherine and her daughter, Clara ( Samantha Mathis ), who has serious commitment issues, both professionally and personally. (Clara to Katherine: “I finally see how you see me, Mom. And it’s horrible.” Gertrude to Katherine, about Clara: “She sees her mother. It’s you who cannot see your daughter.”) And the sequences showing the courtship of Clara by Mike Clark (the charming Colin Hanks) are as stale as 1950s B-movie romance.

While Mr. Kaufman is to be commended for holding back on the schmaltz in his use of Beethoven’s music, there are remarkably few cases of that music’s stirring your heart here. The most affecting of these moments find Mr. Grenier’s Beethoven working through the composition of Variation 32 amid much psycho-sturm und drang and, especially, a hospital sequence in which the “Kyrie eleison” is heard.

Ms. Fonda herself sings in that scene, in a voice that is heartbreaking in its reedy frailness. By then, Katherine’s illness has advanced to the point where her tongue twitches, and she cannot feed herself.

Yet as Ms. Fonda plays her, you still sense the rigidity of Katherine’s will. Her elegantly restrained rendering of a struggle between fierce human consciousness and mortal decay comes close to matching “the notes ascending ­ a rising promise” that Katherine says she hears in Beethoven’s music.

33 VARIATIONS

Written and directed by Moisés Kaufman ; music by Beethoven ; sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Janice Pytel; lighting by David Lander; sound by André J. Pluess; projection design by Jeff Sugg; choreography by Daniel Pelzig; dramaturgy by Mark Bly; production stage manager, Linda Marvel; production manager, Juniper Street Productions; general manager, 101 Productions Ltd; associate producer, Paula Herold. A Tectonic Theater Project (Greg Reiner, executive director; Dominick Balletta, general manager; Jeffrey LaHoste, senior producer). Presented by David Binder, Ruth Hendel, Barbara Whitman, Goldberg/Mills, Latitude Link, Arielle Tepper Madover, Bill Resnick, Eric Schnall, Jayne Baron Sherman, Willis/True Love Productions; managing director, Eric Schnall. At the Eugene O’Neill Theater, 230 West 49th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200. Through May 24. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

WITH: Jane Fonda (Dr. Katherine Brandt), Samantha Mathis (Clara Brandt), Colin Hanks (Mike Clark), Zach Grenier (Ludwig van Beethoven), Don Amendolia (Anton Diabelli), Susan Kellermann (Dr. Gertrude Ladenburger), Erik Steele (Anton Schindler) and Diane Walsh (Pianist/Musical Director).