Revealing the Layers

At 21, Jon Marans thought he had the world all figured out. But that changed when, in 1978, he spent several months studying music in Austria.

A Viennese teacher friend made an anti-Semitic comment--and thought nothing of it. So many bomb threats were made against the local synagogue that people were frisked at the door. And, during a trip across the border to Germany, Marans noticed that most traces of the concentration camp at Dachau had been covered over. Erased. The place looked like a park.

“I fell in love with Vienna,” he recalls, but “then I discovered a second layer.

“Growing up, I had never come across anti-Semitism,” says Marans, who is Jewish and grew up in Silver Spring, Md. A cloud passes over his face as he recalls those moments of lost innocence.

“It was a turning point,” he says. “It was one of those moments that informs the rest of your life. That was the first time I realized that there are so many layers, and you have to really look at things to even begin to understand what’s really going on.”

Nineteen years later, he is passing his epiphany along in “Old Wicked Songs,” his play about an aging Viennese voice teacher and a young American piano prodigy who are haunted in different ways by the Holocaust, as well as by personal history. An off-Broadway hit at the Promenade Theatre and a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, it opens Wednesday atthe Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. Director Seth Barrish and the Promenade cast--Justin Kirk of the Broadway and film versions of “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and Hal Robinson, recently seen at the Mark Taper Forum in “Nine Armenians”--have reprised their work in Westwood.

While history divides the characters in “Old Wicked Songs,” music brings them together--specifically, Robert Alexander Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” a haunting cycle of songs about innocence lost and forgiveness found. The songs quite literally set the tone for the men’s actions.

When Marans began writing the play in 1988, he had his actor friend David Pierce in mind to play the student. But by the time the play premiered in Philadelphia in 1995, Pierce had become David Hyde Pierce and was preoccupied with the television show “Frasier.”

“I’m sorry I never got the chance” to play the role, Pierce said in a recent telephone interview, “because it would have been a wonderful role to tackle--and it would have given me an excuse to learn all that Schumann.”

Pierce studied the “Dichterliebe” in a college music theory class, and he marvels at the way Marans has been able to “expand an audience’s understanding of the play through the music and, at the same time, without condescending to the audience, expand its understanding of the music through the play.”

After all, he jokes, “You don’t think of that piece of music and think, ‘Gee, it would be good if only it had a play attached to it.’ ”

Visiting Westwood to observe rehearsals, Marans, who lives in New York, speaks guardedly at first, wary of revealing too much about himself or the plot of his play. Gradually, though, he relaxes. Tentativeness gives way to earnestness and shy smiles light his boyish face.

Marans studied the “Dichterliebe” while in Vienna, and he uses his knowledge of its style--lieder songs--to help explain his play.

“Lieder--and especially Schumann lieder--are really duets,” Marans says. “The piano has become a partner to the voice. There has to be this partnership, and you can’t have this partnership unless there is this trust and this opening up of feelings.”

Professor Josef Mashkan, the teacher in Marans’ story, is a brilliant instructor on the skids. Stephen Hoffman, the student, is a headstrong 25-year-old piano prodigy who’s trying to work through a performing block that has kept him offstage for a year. He’s studying with Mashkan at a more famous teacher’s insistence.

The men clash over almost everything, from performing styles to politics (it’s 1986, and Austria is about to elect Kurt Waldheim as president, despite his Nazi past). But in the music, Mashkan and Hoffman learn how to work together--how to take the lead for awhile and then give it back in a joyous sharing of power and creativity.

The younger artist hears himself echoed back in the older artist, though in a slightly different way--filtered through all those added years of experience. This too echoes what’s going on in the “Dichterliebe” between Heinrich Heine, who wrote the poems on which it is based, and Schumann.

Heine wrote his poems about a young man’s disappointment in love when he was about 20 years old, Marans says, “so they have this young, angry man’s passion. Schumann wrote the music when he was in his 30s, with a much more knowing quality.

“The whole song cycle is incredibly layered. The lyric does one thing and the music does something else. The words are, ‘I bear no grudge,’ but the music is, ‘I bear no grudge,’ ” he repeats with anger in his voice. “So you know this man is absolutely furious.”

Gradually, Mashkan and Hoffman work through the pain of the past, particularly the teacher’s memories of the Holocaust and the young student’s ghostly encounters with it in Vienna. The teacher doesn’t want to talk about these things at first, but the student--fired with righteous indignation--forces the issue.

It’s a sort of reality check, Marans says--a small-scale enactment of what societies as a whole must do. He makes a parallel to the history of blacks in America. “People say, ‘Why do they have to bring up slavery?’ Well, it’s because it hangs over us. Whether you admit that elephant is in the room or not, it’s still there.”

Robinson, who portrays the teacher, notes that joy and sadness cycle through the play, much as they do through the “Dichterliebe”--and that makes his job more interesting. “An actor uses his instrument,” he says, “and the instrument is everything you are and all that you’ve experienced. This play taps into many different levels of my life. The role sort of plays you like an instrument.”

Marans first achieved a measure of fame when his play “Child Child” was produced in Houston in 1986 and won the national Preston Jones New Play Award. He fine-tuned his craft while working for Michael Douglas’ production company in the mid-to late ‘80s, advancing from script reader to story editor to script doctor.

He began writing “Old Wicked Songs” in 1988 but was repeatedly diverted from it over the next several years. He had always dreamed of writing lyrics for musicals, and fortune seemed to smile when he ended up working on “Gold Diggers” with Mark Bramble of “Barnum” and “42nd Street.” But Broadway and West End productions of the farcical backstage musical, based on the “Gold Diggers” movies of the ‘30s, fell apart at the last moment. Marans also worked with Bramble and Charles Strouse of “Annie” fame on a musical about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, but that project screeched to a halt too.

And then there was “The Carol Burnett Show.” Marans was one of 21 writers for Burnett’s 1991 return to CBS and her old television variety format. Never entirely at ease with itself, however, the show shut down after just two months on the air.

Although “Old Wicked Songs” is being staged locally for the first time with this production, an early chapter in its history unfolded here. A colleague gave Roy Abramsohn, an actor associated with the First Stage play-reading group, a copy of the script in 1994. Abramsohn got excited about it and began talking it up. He played the student opposite Robinson in a First Stage reading in January 1995. A few months later, the play received its world premiere at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia with the pair playing those roles and fellow Angeleno Frank Ferrante directing.

The 1996 Pulitzer was awarded, posthumously, to Jonathan Larson for “Rent,” but Marans got a much-needed boost from being named a finalist. After his heartbreaks in the business, he was, like his student character, wondering whether he had “the passion and the craft and the artistry” to be doing what he was doing. But the pat on the back, which he says is “so rare” in his line of work, has meant a lot.

And so, he has arrived at much the same place as his character.

“I suppose the crux of this play is: In order to grow as an artist, you have to be a mensch. You have to be a person; you have to have values. You have to know who you are,” he says, “and have a certain amount of pride.”

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“OLD WICKED SONGS,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave., Westwood. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 2. Prices: $33.50-$37.50. Phone: (310) 208-5454, (800) 678-5440.