Ringing Truths

The best of dramatic plays, under the best of conditions, offer audiences a glimpse of a larger truth beyond the dialogue and sets at hand. For playwright Jon Marans, such an epiphany figured into his writing of the Pulitzer-nominated “Old Wicked Songs,” which draws on his own discovery of anti-Semitism while studying music in Vienna two decades ago.

In Marans’ play, which opens Thursday at Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, as in his life, music provides ever deeper layers of meaning. Much of the play focuses on Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” which impressed Marans in his youth in Austria.

Marans wrote his play and Schumann his song cycle as more seasoned individuals. Heinrich Heine was a young man when he wrote the poems on which the cycle is based.

“Looking back now, I understand what I didn’t understand at the time [in Vienna],” said Marans, now 41. “Heine was 20 years old, and his words have this young man’s anger, a little bit of this rock [music] thing, bitterness, anger and rage--I responded to that so strongly when I was 19 years old.

“When I looked at the cycle again in my early 30s, I was more aware of the music, of Schumann’s looking back through this layer of time at a young man’s love and loss. I responded to that layer.” Schumann was 30 when he penned his “Dichterliebe” about unrequited love.

After Marans’ “Old Wicked Songs” premiered three years ago in Philadelphia, it became an off-Broadway hit, then a Pulitzer finalist in 1996.

Like Schumann’s haunting cycle, the play is scored for two protagonists: In Laguna, Michael Matthys plays Hoffman, an American piano prodigy who goes to Vienna to study voice in order to overcome a performance block; Charles Lanyer provides counterpoint as Mashkan, his aging voice professor. The Third Reich informs the tale, which takes its title from “Dichterliebe’s” dark final song.

“People have said that if you really look at the play, [the professor] represents the music, the boy represents the words,” Marans said.

“This is a story of two very strong-willed, somewhat arrogant [men]. The only time they’re able to communicate, and we can see their soft side, is when they work on this extraordinarily beautiful piece of music.”

Marans has based another “play with music” on Studs Terkel’s “Coming of Age,” a book about political activists who range in age from 70 to 99. That Marans’ play is written for five actors over age 65 playing 30 roles; it just opened in San Jose.

“Old Wicked Songs” has been presented in England at the Bristol Old Vic and, with Bob Hoskins, at the Gielgud Theater. Last season, it was the second-most performed new play in the United States.

The set for the Laguna Playhouse production promises to be remarkable. Reproduced on an enormous scale are paintings by prominent Viennese artists representing different stages of love--”The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt, “Lovers With Cat” by Oskar Kokoschka and “Seated Couple” by Egon Schiele.

Marans said his favorite production of “Old Wicked Songs” to date was presented in the round in Dallas, and both actors played the piano. The actor who played Mashkan also served as director and musical director.

“He really understood what he was saying,” Marans recalled. “If the script said, ‘dissonant appoggiatura,’ he would point it out in the music. The layer of instruction in the play was there.”

In the Laguna version, the actors mime playing the keys at a Yamaha Disclavier. “We actually sing,” said Lanyer, who plays the professor. “We can both carry a tune.”

In fact, Lanyer, a Laguna Beach resident who most recently starred in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” at South Coast Repertory, studied voice and can read music. But it was a real-life experience that he hopes will inform his performance.

He related an incident following a performance of “2,” a play about Nazi field marshal Hermann Goering and the Nuremburg trials.

“After one of the shows, this rather elderly man came up to me and said with an accent, ‘I enjoyed the play; I have a particular interest in this period of history,’ ” Lanyer recalled. “He was rolling up his sleeves and showing me the tattoos.”

The man was Mel Mermelstein, a Huntington Beach resident who in a landmark 1985 case successfully took on an organization that maintained that the Holocaust never happened. Mermelstein’s tattoos are concentration camp serial numbers.

“I now know that Mel lost his whole family to the Holocaust,” Lanyer continued. “I visited his Holocaust museum. I read his book. I draw on his life.”

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The Mermelstein encounter adds yet another layer to those provided by Marans and Mashkan.

“In the play, the student wants to visit [the concentration camp at] Dachau to see for himself what had happened,” Lanyer said. “Mashkan discourages him. ‘Don’t go to Dachau; it’s just a bunch of dead Jews.’ When Hoffman returns from Dachau, he goes into a long tirade about how it’s been whitewashed, how you’d never know it was once the scene of emaciated bodies and rotting corpses.”

The play’s characters find common ground in the music.

“ ‘Dichterliebe’ is about a lengthy relationship that waxes and wanes, that becomes tortured and tragic,” Lanyer noted. “So does the play in places.”

Marans said that the drama can play out “either way, dark or light. . . . But it ends on a hopeful note.”

* Laguna Playhouse’s production of “Old Wicked Songs” runs Thursday through Jan. 31 at the Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday and 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. $31-$38. (949) 497-2787.