STAGE REVIEW : Landscaping a Mind ‘Bouquet’

There is a moment in Eric Overmyer’s “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin” that goes something like this: “Maybe I’m dreamin’ you dreamin’ my dream.”

It is a summation of the play.

“Heliotrope,” which opened Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse, offers a lush landscape of the mind that exults in words and makes its eventual point by constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing and dissecting an impression. Not much more. Or less.

Overmyer has taken a simple historical fact--the turn-of-the-century collaboration of Joplin and Chauvin on “The Heliotrope Bouquet”--as a springboard for a meditation on the impermanence of art.

Joplin, a dedicated and published ragtime artist, lived long enough (1868-1917) to assemble a musical legacy and a reputation that included aspirations to major work with his opera “Treemonisha.” But ragtime subsided. Joplin’s name lapsed into obscurity, languishing there with his unproduced opera until the 1970s, when the movie “The Sting” used Joplin’s “The Entertainer” as its theme and “Treemonisha” found its first production.

Chauvin, on the other hand, was a meteor--an unschooled, unfettered genius 13 years Joplin’s junior, deep into women and opium and unconcerned with posterity. He died in his 27th year (of syphilis, as Joplin would too some years later), leaving behind only “The Heliotrope Bouquet” composed with Joplin, and only because Joplin set it down.

But these facts are not the point. They’re the trigger for Overmyer’s broader speculation about life and art. His “dream of ragtime rapture” is structured as an act of stage prestidigitation, skillfully embraced by director Stan Wojewodski Jr., who has made no secret of his affection for Overmyer’s “poetically charged” writing. The overcooked erudition of Overmyer’s “On the Verge or the Geography of Yearning” is fortunately missing from “Heliotrope” (though they share the same affection for long titles), but the poetic effusion can still be confusing, especially at first, when we still need to get our bearings.

It does, however, become clearer, and less prepossessing, as we navigate the murky regions of Joplin’s past: his love for his first wife Belle, whom he later confuses with his second one, Lottie (a compassionate and well-defined performance in both roles by Judyann Elder); his several encounters with Chauvin (an ironic Victor Mack), and a representative gallery of sports and prostitutes from the New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago of his ebullient salad days.

John Cothran Jr. plays Joplin looking back on all this at the end of his days with the despairing confusion brought on by advancing illness and sorrow. It’s a fine performance in a play that moves us more by the beauty of its presentation than its philosophizing.

The loss of Joplin’s daughter in infancy, the disappointments with “Treemonisha” (also spurned by his publisher, played here by F. William Parker), are given symbolic importance. But the meditation is abstract and the intellectual exploration predictably inconclusive.

If one can be sustained by the sheer visual beauty of this theatrical experience, there should be no complaints. In a play that is the re-creation of an essence, designers Christopher Barreca (sets), Richard Pilbrow (lights) and Catherine Zuber (costumes) contribute the lion’s share of the magic. The stage is bare except for a back wall of shuttered doors, a central piano and a majestic spiral stairway descending from (or ascending to) the heights. And the striking blue parquet floor emphasizes the unreality of this imaginary landscape.

Within its borders, a graceful company conducts an investigation much more fragile and ephemeral than the gently ironic dream that conveys it. It’s the beauty of that dream, not its argument, that makes “Heliotrope” worth the journey.

* “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Forum, UC San Diego, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 15. $21-$29; (619) 534-3960. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

‘The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin’

John Cothran: Jr. Scott Joplin

Victor Mack: Louis Chauvin

Judyann Elder: Spanish Mary/Lottie/Belle

F. William Parker: Stark

June Jones: Joy

Linda Cavell: Hannah

Ellen M. Bethea: Spice

Denise Diggs: Felicity

Keith Randolph Smith: Turpin

SaMi Chester: Trick John/Keeler

Robert A. Owens: Disappearing Sam

A presentation of La Jolla Playhouse in collaboration with Baltimore’s Center Stage and in association with AT&T;:OnStage. Director Stan Wojewodski Jr. Playwright Eric Overmyer. Sets Christopher Barreca. Lights Richard Pilbrow. Costumes Catherine Zuber. Sound Janet Kalas. Musical director Dwight Andrews. Recorded pianist William Ransom. Choreographer Donald Byrd. Stage manager Julie Thompson. Dramaturgs James Magruder, Mona Heinze.