Opus

Play by Michael Hollinger
Directed by Jim Petosa
With Shelley Bolman, Benjamin Evett, Michael Kaye, Becky Webber, Bates Wilder

New Repertory Theatre
Arsenal Center for the Arts
Watertown, MA

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When Ben Evett walks on stage with his violin at the opening of this wonderful drama about the life of a string quartet, he looks so comfortable with his instrument that I thought surely he must be a trained violinist. Apparently he is not. Nor, apparently, are the other members of the cast trained on the instruments which each of them plays at playing. In the opening scene, in which they all gesture along with an audio recording of a string quartet as though they were actually playing it , the playing is clearly fake, but not so distant from the music that the simulated gestures are not compelling. Their playing at playing is actually very good, and the gestures, though clearly not real ones, are very good approximations.

So, too, the action of Opus is clearly more dramatically fake than the goings-on in a typical chamber music ensemble, but it is a dramatic fakeness that makes artistic sense and rings true. That action involves a complex dance of the quartet’s four (and more!) personalities, involving steps that echo the tensions and confusions between their professional roles and their personal relationships. Underlying the dance at every turn is the question of Art and how best to make it, and given the quartet’s expressed reverence for that ideal, it is no small wonder that the drama will entail some serious sacrifices.

Though Opus is clearly a drama based on the fortunes of a mythical string quartet, it is likely that some of the play’s inspiration comes from works like Indivisible by Four, a memoir by Arnold Steinhardt, who was first violinist of the famed and long-lived Guarneri Quartet. The quartet of Opus is named after a famous mythical Italian violin-maker, as was the Guarneri Quartet named after a real one. The action of the play is different from the history of the Guarneri Quartet, but the telling of the tale of the long, complex allegiance of the four very different members draws out the same kind of curiosity and sympathies.

For anyone who thinks the inner life of a string quartet is dull, Opus will be a contrapuntal corrective. When witnessing a quartet coming out onstage uniformly arrayed in formal attire, one can easily presume a kind of uniformity that, beneath the similarity of garb, and technical virtuosity, does not exist. In Opus, the divergent characters are distinctively and interestingly drawn. Shelley Bolman as Alan, the second violinist, is a relaxed and rousing ordinary guy type, while Elliot, played with appropriately distilled snootiness by Michael Kaye, is the exact opposite – a tight, controlling and fussy first violinist. Bates Wilder’s Karl, the cellist, appears to fuse things together quietly from below, until the narrative forces a variation upon his settled theme and makes counterpoint out of what could have been a monotonous figured bass line. And Ben Evett as Dorian – so nicely named after a haunting modal alternative to our conventional diatonic scale – is the moody, but inspired, violist whose disappearance sets the initial drama of the evening.

In Evett’s hands, Dorian’s volatility hovers in an exciting way between the extremes of fragmentation and inspiration. At once he is both personally unpredictable and aesthetically unsurpassable, and it is this fine double-visioning that ultimately allows the audience to see, in stereo-optic fulfillment, the dimensions of artistic vision.

Becky Webber as Grace, the replacement for Dorian, provides an appropriate and engaging mix of the freshness of the new, young talent, and the astuteness of a refined artist. With her own backbone intact, she provides additional thump to what becomes a complex rhythm of interactions.

It is wonderful to hear the plaintive melodies of Beethoven C-sharp minor quartet resounding throughout. In the landscape of quartet music, this masterpiece represents an apogee of pathos and introspective drama so eloquently attenuated and colored by the genius of Beethoven in his late period. The drama of the play, echoing the drama of the music, is pitched precariously on its own apogee. The famed quartet has an impending performance of this piece at the White House into which Dorian’s disappearance has thrown a mighty wrench. The ingenious plot becomes dense with intersecting personal dramas as the quartet seeks, and finds, Dorian’s replacement, and in the follow-up, becomes as thick with as many chromatic and unexpected turns as the C-sharp minor quartet itself. The tail of the play provides a bit of the same sort of climax that Yazmina Reza’s play Art provides, with an explosive challenge to the integrity of something which is implicitly sacred to players and audience alike. Metaphorically, this impulsive gesture echoes forth in the rearrangements and re-allegiances of the characters themselves.

In the end, Opus raises the question of artistic integrity and sends it crashing into questions about camaraderie, devotion and fidelity. How far are we to sacrifice ourselves and our relations to produce the best art? What is the form of personal vulnerability that yields aesthetic results, and which forms hinder them from developing? How does one distinguish between the personal traits which evoke artistic quality – however annoyingly unsettling they may seem – and the kind which constrain at the expense of vision? What, in the end, makes art better than it might be, and how far, as a complex social organism, are we willing to go to bring that about?

There is no intermission, and for the run of the piece one feels exactly what one feels while listening, in one stretch, to the Beethoven C-Sharp minor quartet – an unremitting probing into the corners of self and mutuality, of artistic inspiration and the sacrifices humans make to put it foremost.

It is particularly nice to see Ben Evett venturing his talents as an actor here. He was, for many years, a member of the American Repertory Theatre company, and, in recent years, was the founder of, and frequent actor and director in, Boston’s wonderful Actors’ Shakespeare Project, As well, it is great to see Jim Petosa, from the Boston University School of Theatre, contribute his formidable skills. It is a pleasure to see this interpenetration of talents from different corners of the Boston theatre world, which, along with other similar gestures elsewhere, suggests a renaissance of artistic mutuality among the many inspired dramatic hubs of the area.

– BADMan