Review: "Opus" at the Old Globe

I have just seen a wonderful play called Opus at the Old Globe in San Diego, performed in the Arena Stage at Copley Auditorium—which means the temporary theater in the round set up in the auditorium of the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park while the old Cassius Carter is being taken apart and rebuilt.

It is always dangerous to quote great classics, whether literary or musical, in a modern play. Hearing the sounds of the masters usually exposes the comparatively threadbare labors of lesser lights. This play, which is filled with bits of great classical music and a strategically placed quotation from Hamlet, is an exception. The dialogue is fresh, alive, pointed, funny, and moving without being sappy. The acting ensemble is first-rate: every one of the five characters is performed with exquisite conviction, clarity, complexity, comprehension, and—to abandon alliteration as one of the characters does at a certain point in the play—wit.

The play is about the relations among the four members of a classical string quartet (human ensemble) in the present, with flashbacks to the same quartet with its previous violist. As in a good string quartet (musical piece), the interrelations among the twos, threes, and fours vary and finally join in a meaningful whole, though human resolutions rarely have the finality of musical ones. But that’s all I want to say about the plot.

The directing is precise and fruitful, exhibiting none of the artificial and distracting turns that so often bedevil plays performed in the round. And the technical effects are brought off seamlessly—I am of course discounting one patron’s candy wrapper and another’s cell phone ring that involved a classical music tone bizarrely seeming at first to be a misplaced sound cue. (Why cannot people learn these two simple lessons? It is not as if the warning isn’t made before EVERY DAMN SHOW!). The actors’ imitation of string-instrument playing takes a middle course between impossible-to-pull-off literalism and mere symbolic gesture: Their bow arms move more or less appropriately while their left hands do not pretend to any fingering. (I did spend a moment trying to figure how they made so little sound till I put the analytical part of my mind to rest by deciding the bows were probably strung with silk instead of horsehair—I have no idea whether this is actually so, but the thought allowed me to forget the question and enjoy the show.)

A few more points of praise are due: From the outset one expects that such a play will set up music as the thematic background for getting into the humanity of the players. Opus does that, as, being a play rather than a string quartet, it must. But I found it wonderful that the play also conveys something of what it is for great music to lift such individuals out of themselves into the mysterious unifying harmonies of great art. That too a play about musicians must do, I suppose. But though I confess to coming in rather expecting a festival of cliché, I found instead the script so lively, the directing so deft, the acting so superb, and the overall shape so poignant, that, though I would not call it a great play, the performance as a whole seemed to tap into a vein of truth of which cliché can only ever be (to use a cliché) a pale reflection. It’s a darn good play about life and art in a captivating production.

So, in addition to the production staff, I commend by name the writer, Michael Hollinger, the director, Kyle Donnelly, and the five actors (in alphabetical order), Jim Abele, Jeffrey M. Bender, Corey Brill, Mark H. Dold, and Katie Sigismund. Bravo.

Catch it if you’re in town. It’s on until April 26.