Piedmont Players stage an opus
At its best it’s like making love, at its worst it’s like swallowing Drano.
Performing in a string quartet, that is.
That’s the view of high-strung (no pun intended) Dorian, in Michael Hollinger’s, witty and taut-as-a-bowstring play about making music, Opus, now in a briskly enjoyable Piedmont Players production at the Piedmont Center for the Arts. Dorian knows whereof he speaks, since he’s one fourth of the internationally famed Lazara Quartet, which has just won a Grammy for a Bartok CD. Or, rather, he was a member of the Lazara, because as the drama begins, the remaining three-quarters of the group, Elliot, Alan and Carl, have just booted him out in favor of a talented and attractive recent music school grad named Grace. Thus they’ve acquired their first woman collaborator, along with a passel of trouble, not all of it musical.
“Beautifully orchestrated!” my wife commented as we strolled out of the theater. I agree. Director Michael French shapes Hollinger’s play deftly, aided by a smart support team that includes Emma Nicholls (assistant director), Heather Gallagher (lighting), Jim Jenkins (sound) and Suzanne Latham, who supplied the props, the most important of which are the richly glowing violins, a viola, a cello, that are so convincingly bowed by the actors that you come to believe (or want to believe) they’re actually playing them. The production is enhanced by ravishing music: Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven, particularly Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14, Opus 131, on which much of the drama hangs.
Climaxing in a White House command performance, Opus is about musical collaboration in a double sense, about how the interpreters of a quartet have to make each of its musical strands come together and about how they have to come together as people. It’s personal, in other words, so though the musicians are friends, they’re temperamental friends, each with a take both on how a work should be played and on how they should get along. So they fuss, lament and reminisce, suffer and exult, in scenes in which each of them stands solo, speaking directly to the audience, alternating with scenes in which their voices join in dramatic/comic moments that mingle ego, sex, mortality.
The play is ingeniously structured like…well, like a string quartet.
The actors do admirable ensemble work. This is one of those productions where you can’t single anyone out as best; they’re all very fine: John Simpson as Carl, Stephen Rexrode as Alan, Michael Sally as Elliot, Benoît Monin as Dorian, and Christy Crowley as Grace.
Thanks for the production’s success must also go to producer, Nancy Lehrkind.
Opus plays at the Piedmont Center for the arts Friday-Sunday, October 24-26. Tickets available at brownpapertickets.com or at the door. For further information, contact info@piedmontcenterforthearts.com.
–ROBERT HALL