Theatre in Review: The Morini Strad (Primary Stages at 59E59)

Mary Beth Peil has been on a roll lately. She is responsible for many a crackling confrontation as Julianna Margulies' imperious, meddling mother-in-law on the excellent CBS series The Good Wife. Earlier this season, slipping into something more comfortable, she gave audiences the ooh-la-la, slinking her way through "Ah! Paris" in the acclaimed revival of Follies. Now she has a full-blown vehicle of her own in Willy Holtzman's new play. She is Erica Morini, a real-life violin virtuoso who made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic at 12, and went on to enjoy a glittering adult career. When we meet her, she is an elderly widow living in lonely splendor in a vast New York apartment, attended by a nurse and housekeeper, both of whom she detests, and passing the time giving acerbic corrections to a handful of students. She's also convinced that the lawyers and conservators who oversee her money are robbing her blind.

An Old World aristocrat with inflexible standards, a woman who married well and socialized with the music-world elite of her day -- there is plenty of chitchat about Arturo, Lenny, et al. -- she is appalled by the slim pickings life has to offer her in her sunset years. ("I have an incurable condition called old age," she says, with something less than originality.) Whether explaining to an unseen student that there is no need to attack the violin, informing a hated rival on the phone that he is a talentless hack, or refusing to be admitted to the hospital, despite that fact that she can barely stand up, Peil makes Erica one formidable old dame. She also teases out the character's bleak sense of humor, mocking her solitude by pretending to be Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond ("I'm still big -- it's the music that got small!"). And when she launches into rhapsodic accounts of her career or reveals the ecstasy she felt when playing, she commands one's attention.

Still, it's not hard to feel that the lady deserves better material. Most of The Morini Strad details Erica's relationship with Brian, a violin maker and restorer. It's a cagey, cat-and-mouse affair at first; she hires him to restore the title object, a storied instrument that she has, in a moment of abstraction, damaged rather visibly. (She frets that her irresponsible behavior could be held against her in a competency hearing, so she wants the repair to be executed in total secrecy.) Brian (a fine Michael Laurence), who barely supports his wife (a composer) and two adolescent sons with his repair work, has little sympathy for Erica's noblesse-oblige manner and leisure-class complaints. There's plenty of sparring between them -- especially since she won't let the violin out of her sight, even to be repaired -- but things change when Erica, knowing a frustrated artist when she sees one, asks Brian to help her sell her valued violin, offering him a substantial commission on a probable sale of at least a few million dollars -- the kind of cash that would allow him to set up his own violin-making business.

The main problem with The Morini Strad is the one that plagues almost all two-handers -- their sheer predictability. We're barely into the first few volleys of insults before we know Erica and Brian will end up special friends, sharing secrets, their eyes filling up with tears on cue. Aiming for novelty, Holtzman tosses in a mystery, involving the disappearance of the violin. (In real life, someone stole all of Morini's valuables, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.) From this point on, the action becomes increasingly implausible, even as one wonders why, with such interesting material at hand, Holtzman -- who, a few years ago, gave us a really fine play in Something You Did -- settles for a standard, sentimental genre piece.

Providing further evidence of the author's intentions is the dialogue, which, too often, feels borrowed from mid-level television sitcoms. Criticizing a dinner made by Brian's wife, she comments on "gelatinous white cubes" in the entrée. That's tofu, Brian points out, rolling his eyes for an easy laugh. When Brian mentions John Lennon by last name only, Erica makes a crack about him murdering the Czar. A dejected Brian says that a violin is only a block of wood. Erica replies, confusingly, "So is a house! So is a coffin! It's the life inside that counts!" (The life inside a coffin?) Anyway, Holtzman plays by the rules of the game, so we have The Big Fight, when Brian, fed up with Erica's dictates, snaps, "If you ask me, art is a poor substitute for living!" And, of course, there's the moment then these two antagonists lay down their defenses and execute a little dance.

Thanks to Peil and Laurence -- as well as the violin stylings of Hanah Stuart, who appears as a kind of vision of the younger Erica -- it all goes down easily, if unmemorably. If Casey Childs, the director, has gotten fine work out of his cast, he has also elicited a somewhat problematic design. Neil Patel's elegant setting -- a single room with a hardwood floor and elegant classical moldings -- serves neatly as both Erica's apartment and Brian's workshop. Jan Hartley's projections work very well in the transitions -- providing images of trains rushing by or whirling police lights -- but, too often, the images are allowed to linger through a scene, adding an unnecessary level of visual clutter. (A shot of an Upper West Side apartment house does a nice job of setting the scene; why must it remain, distracting us from the actors?) The use of projections doesn't solve the problem of the many brief moments, in various locations, that make up the climax; during the last 15 minutes or so, the scene changes feel longer than some of the scenes themselves. In any case, David C. Woolard's costumes are right for each character, M. L. Geiger's lighting provides a number of graceful cross fades, and Lindsay Jones offers some original music as well as a variety of sound effects (trains, barking dogs, electric guitar sounds.)

I must add that, at the performance I attended, the audience gave The Morini Strad a very warm reception; I can see this piece being picked up by all sorts of resident theatres looking for a crowd-pleaser to fill out their season schedules. But shouldn't a play about the imperatives of art offer more than the shopworn ideas available here? The moral of Holtzman's play is, you're nobody until somebody loves you. Really--I hadn't heard that.--David Barbour