Music Taps an Emotional Wellspring

Under the guise of a series of music lessons, “Old Wicked Songs” by Jon Marans is really about the importance of reconnecting to our emotionally severed lives as the only way to move past trauma and grief. And with more than enough trauma and grief to go around these days, Jenny Sullivan’s eloquent staging for Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre proves a particularly timely revival.

Modulating with deceptive ease between affable comedy and bitter cynicism, veteran actor Harold Gould takes masterful command of the stage as professor Mashkan, the Austrian music teacher whose mercurial mood swings and mysterious past pose a constant challenge to Stephen (Joseph Fuqua), a visiting young American pianist.

Pinpoint timing and convincing naturalism in the exchanges between the performers nails the underlying desperation in both characters. Stephen, a child prodigy, is on the verge of abandoning his career after recognizing himself as nothing more than an accomplished mimic--coasting on technique without passion.

Plunged into the ornate, disquietingly erotic Viennese decor of Mashkan’s studio (a lushly rendered set by Thomas A. Giamario), Stephen is so dissociated he needs to wear a tie to remind himself he’s alive.

Sugarcoating his penetrating insights into Stephen’s emotional blockage, Gould’s Mashkan pries the pupil from sterile, uptight intellectualism through a mandatory tour of composer Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe”--a work Stephen dismisses at first as indulgent romanticism. Forced to abandon his keyboard and assume the singing role, Fuqua’s Stephen flounders hilariously, bereft of familiar moorings as he tries to navigate the tone poem’s strange emotional currents.

In keeping with the dangerous, demonic role of art identified by the German novelist Thomas Mann, the forces unleashed by these lessons prove equally disruptive for Mashkan. Gould’s moving portrayal shows the erosion of the defenses the professor has carefully constructed to keep at bay the overwhelming legacy of the Holocaust.

Shrewdly set in 1986, on the eve of Kurt Waldheim’s election to the Austrian presidency despite reports of his past Nazi affiliations, Marans’ two-character drama mirrors an entire society coming to grips with its troubled past.

The integration of Schumann’s song cycle into the evolving action is one of the production’s strengths. Gould performs some of the keyboard passages himself, with music director David Potter supplying the tracks for more challenging passages, convincingly delivered through the onstage piano via Yamaha Disklavier software. As Fuqua’s singing gains in assurance, so does his character’s ability to lead a life of authentic feeling--a bit of stage alchemy whose ultimate measure of success is whether it engulfs the audience as well. And thanks to this expertly crafted, schmaltz-free production, it does.

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“Old Wicked Songs,” Laurel Theatre, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 18. $28-$33. (805) 667-2900. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.