Playwright: Moises Kaufman. At: TimeLine Theatre at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: 1-773-327-5252; www.timelinetheatre.com; $32-$42. Runs through: Oct. 21
As a play, 33 Variations is more interesting than good, although it offers meaty acting roles, colorful characters, personal struggle, a concert pianist and enough thoughtfulness to pass as a work of intellectual merit. Certainly, the Timeline production is audience-pleasing, with master director Nick Bowling guiding veteran lead players.
The play splits its time between present-day Bonn, Germany, and 1819-23 Vienna, Austria. In Bonn (and preliminarily in New York) we meet Dr. Katherine Brandt, a psychologist and musical researcher with ALS, and her adult daughter, Clara. In Vienna, we meet Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), the subject of Brandt's final research project. Brandt wonders why Beethoven spent three yearswhile enduring personal difficulties and declining healthcomposing variations on a little waltz most scholars regard as mediocre, written by a music publisher who requested only one variation from Beethoven but got a major solo piano work instead.
Along the way, Brandt and her daughter gain insights into themselves and their rocky relationship, in part through close associates each acquires, just as the real-life Anton Schindler (also a character in the play) provided essential support to Beethoven in his last years. Brandt's help-mate is her German research assistant; Clara's, conveniently, is an ALS specialist male nurse and boyfriend. It's this too-calculated parallel structurethree lead characters each with an assistantthat diminishes the play as does the obvious parallel between Beethoven and Brandt in physical decline while at the height of their creative powers.
Reminiscent, at times, of Peter Schaffer's Amadeus and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (a modern researcher tries to determine what Byron was up to 150 years earlier), 33 Variations benefits from a formally dressed concert pianist (George Lepauw) actually performing many of the variations. It's a gimmick, but one that's essential to making the play work. You don't gain new insights into Beethoven, but you come to understand his music better and appreciate his singular genius. Also, late in the play there are tender mother/daughter moments that will touch anyone who's ever cared for a dying loved one.
Janet Ulrich Brooks and Terry Hamilton, as Brandt and Beethoven, have little direct interaction but make a pair nonetheless: dogged, dismissive individuals we find appealing in part because of the wry understandings Brooks and Hamilton muster in an instant and express with the tic of an eye. The more-than-capable supporting cast features, among others, Matthew Krause in the tricky role of the slavishly-devoted Schindler, Juliet Hart as the cucumber-cool research assistant and Jessie Fisher as emotionally-repressed daughter Clara. Brian Sidney Bembridge has created a neutral-toned two-level set of plywood panels as a background for Mike Tutaj's atmospheric architectural projections. TimeLine's 33 Variations is a good show, even if not a great play.