A Relaxing ‘Fire,’ in Mellow Tones

Music does it all; it’s the food of love, it soothes the savage beast, you name it. It can cut straight to the heart of any matter in a moment, a note.

Sometimes all you need in the theater is a character on stage reacting to a particularly stunning musical passage. Lately, popular successes as disparate as “Amadeus” (Mozart envy), “Master Class” (Callas lust) and the jazz-crazed “Side Man” (“A Night in Tunisia” as emotional orgasm) make the music tell the story, focusing on characters who forget everything when they hear the magic sounds.

Add to this list “The Magic Fire,” Lillian Garrett-Groag’s piquant memory play making its Southern California debut at the Old Globe Theatre. When the extended Berg-Guarneri family (half Viennese, half Italian) soaks up an opera recording or a radio broadcast, it’s all over. These highly partisan family members may debate one tenor versus another, the “chalky” sound of the Germans versus the “sunshine” pouring out of the mouths of Italians, but they’re transported. Opera makes them forget everything happening around them. Peron’s Argentina circa 1952, home of exiles from the world over, recedes from sight, as well as sound.

The play isn’t momentous or walloping. It’s leisurely and atmospheric, rather than a narrative hard-driver. Nonetheless Los Angeles-based playwright Garrett-Groag, whose previous works include “The Ladies of the Camellias” and “The White Rose,” is after an ambitious mixture of family reminiscence and social observation. I wouldn’t call “The Magic Fire” a major play, but it’s most stage-worthy. It has a shrewd sort of charm. And in director Jack O’Brien’s co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where it recently played), it’s getting a fine and mellow rendition.

The title refers to the ring of fire in Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” protecting the heroine, Brunnhilde. As Lise, the play’s adult narrator remembers it, her father used music as a different kind of protection: as a shield against the repressive forces gathering outside, all too reminiscent of the wartime Europe they fled a few years earlier.

Lise (Kandis Chappell) shares the stage and often interacts with her younger self, the precocious, deeply dramatic 7-year-old Lise (Marcelle Friedman and Alyze Rozsnyai, alternating in the role). The adult Lise wanders through her memories of her childhood. Her engineer father, Otto (James R. Winker), and mother, Amalia (Katherine McGrath), served as the sane, “civilized” core of a family rife with operatic extremes. The 97-year-old Maddalena Guarneri (Deborah Taylor) anchored one end of the family; she’s a century’s worth of compressed Italianate rage in one stooped woman, tended to by her expansive son, Giovanni (Peter Van Norden), Lise’s loving grandfather.

The iron-fisted Peron regime is personified by family friend Gen. Henri Fontannes (Charles Shaw Robinson), Lise’s unofficial uncle. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly about the political awakening of father Otto, a man looking only for peace and musical solace, but who cannot remain uninvolved forever.

Playwright Garrett-Groag has revised the third act (yes, it’s an old-fashioned, three-act play) since a different production earlier this year at the Minneapolis Guthrie Theater. Act 3’s still on the heavy-handed side, and you do wish the play had less of the narrator intrusion bit, but Chappell’s quite wonderful as the adult Lise. She sells the conceit, elegantly.

The standout here was the standout at the Guthrie: Van Norden’s expressive, fulminating grandfather, a prime lesson in how to take a lively character to the borderline of caricature without crossing it. He and Taylor’s ancient-seeming but vitally alive great-grandmother nail everything Garrett-Groag hands them in the play’s most sure-fire roles. There’s lovely work, too, from Barbara Oliver’s Clara, a repository of Viennese grace, and the simple, truthful Rosa of Sharon Lockwood.

I wish Winker’s Otto were less obviously coy, and McGrath’s Amalia less prone to aghast, affronted reactions. Directorially O’Brien might’ve taken the second act--a beautifully sustained birthday party sequence in which young Lise gets sloshed--at more of a tumult. The play’s not a Feydeau farce, certainly, but it benefits from a rhythmic contrast to all that relaxed conversation. Overall, though, the staging’s excellent, more delicate yet funnier than the very good Libby Appel production seen at the Guthrie.

O’Brien’s design team, composed of scenic designer Ralph Funicello, lighting designer York Kennedy, costume designer Anna Oliver and sound designer Jeff Ladman, creates an enclosed, somewhat insular world of burgundy drapes and shadows and aural echoes. A smudged pane of glass catches our eye on the left-hand side of the stage. Seeing characters pass behind it is like glimpsing one woman’s memories, as Luc Sante put it in “Low Life,” his book on old New York, “as if through a smeared window.”

* “The Magic Fire,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends July 3. $23-$39. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes.

‘The Magic Fire’

Judith-Marie Bergan: Elena Guarneri/Blasina

Kandis Chappell: Lise Berg

Charles Dean: Alberto Barcos

Sharon Lockwood: Rosa Arrua

Katherine McGrath: Amalia Berg

Barbara Oliver: Clara Stepaneck

Charles Shaw Robinson: Gen. Henri Fontannes

Mary Stark: Paula Guarneri

Deborah Taylor: Maddalena Guarneri

Peter Van Norden: Gianni Guarneri/Giovanni

James R. Winker: Otto Berg

Marcelle Friedman: Young Lise on alternate days

Alyze Rozsnyai: Young Lise on alternate days

Written by Lillian Garrett-Groag. Directed by Jack O’Brien. Set design by Ralph Funicello. Costume design by Anna R. Oliver. Lighting design by York Kennedy. Sound design by Jeff Ladman. Stage managers D. Adams and Joel Rosen.