Impressionism

The Broadway shows 33 Variations, at the Eugene O’Neill, and Impressionism, at the Gerald Schoenfeld, have two elements in common. The first is star power: Returning to the stage for the first time in 46 years, Jane Fonda plays a dying musicologist sleuthing a mystery involving Beethoven in 33 Variations, while Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen, unseen on Broadway since winning Tonys in the ‘80s, tread cautiously toward romance in the gallery-set Impressionism. The second is finely detailed projections that bring the worlds of classical music and painting, the province of other parts of Manhattan, to vivid life in the theatre district.

Written and directed by Moises Kaufman (The Laramie Project), 33 Variations takes Fonda’s character, Dr. Katherine Brandt, from her unsettled domestic life in New York (Samantha Mathis plays her estranged daughter and Colin Hanks her nurse) to Bonn, where Beethoven’s archives are stored. Her objective, as her health fades, is to discover why the composer spent four turbulent years working on the comparatively minor “Diabelli Variations,” and the production depicts the parallel story of their composition in early 19th century Vienna. Jeff Sugg, who co-created the set and projections for last season’s musical, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, recalls having his gear on hand as the project took shape from rehearsals to productions at Arena Stage in 2007 and La Jolla Playhouse last year. “Moises had been to Bonn and had seen the archives and got to see those sheets of paper first hand. He really fell in love with that and wanted to show those pages to the audience.”

Projected images of those sheets of paper suffuse Derek McLane’s archives set. “Derek’s set is extremely specific but also extremely malleable, so Moises asked me to find, for example, the train station in Bonn,” Sugg says. “I didn’t want to do backdrop projections, so I found a central element as a signifier, in that case, signs. The pages, sketches, and musical notes are one of the projection system elements; the others are those signifiers of realistic places, and the third the ghostly, Muybridge-inspired animations, like horses that canter across the stage and the appearance of a miniature Beethoven, which add a spiritual presence that melds the different worlds together. Being as involved in rehearsal as I was helped me work through those ideas.”

In New York, a small paper screen was added to fly in for a scene in which the sketches of the compositions materialize. “I took the time to further develop things that were added late in La Jolla, so everything had a unity to it, and it didn’t feel stodgy or digital. It was very important to me that the pages retain their parchment texture as projections, that they felt like something from the 1800s. I was interested in using the projections to represent the process of memory, which is often two-dimensional and planar. It’s a funny thing about the horses, for example. I’ve had people come up to me following a performance and compliment me on the carriage. But there is no carriage; they’ve made that up,” Sugg laughs.

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