Jon Marans takes a most unsentimental view of his wrenching play about a music student and his teacher. A finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, "Old Wicked Songs" is now drawing tears and ovations at Studio Theatre. "I wrote a tough play about a professor who is a charming, manic-depressive sonofabitch and a student who is a cold, emotionally removed, arrogant young man," Marans said, "and how only when . . . they discuss music do we see their romantic core."
Studio's version of the play may be a little softer and more emotionally open than the playwright's own interpretation, but it seems to work for Washington audiences. "I've gotten so many letters, phone calls and e-mails from people," said director Serge Seiden.
"Old Wicked Songs" is set in Vienna in 1986, just as former Nazi Kurt Waldheim was about to be elected president of Austria. An artistically blocked American piano prodigy arrives to study with an eccentric music professor. They circle each other warily while working on Robert Schumann's song cycle of love and loss, the "Dichterliebe," until the music begins to peel away their emotional defenses.
Seiden consulted Marans on technical matters (the piano cues are amazingly realistic and Seiden won't reveal how it all works). But he didn't go into the deeper meanings of the play with him. Marans sees its Holocaust theme as a subtle presence, while Seiden brings it more to the surface. He took his actors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at the start of rehearsals. Marans, who was in the audience on opening night, admits, "I need to let this play go and let other people do their interpretations of it."
Marans, 40, is from Silver Spring and says of having his play -- whether it's exactly his interpretation or not -- done on his home turf: "What else could it feel but great?" His predictably proud parents, Rhoda and Nelson Marans, still live in Silver Spring. His mother plans to bring a group of 60 to a performance at Studio. Meanwhile, "Old Wicked Songs," produced to acclaim in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal and much of Europe (but not Austria), pays the bills while Marans works on two musicals and a play. Cassidy Remembered
Members of the Washington theater community gathered to say one last goodbye to Grainne Cassidy on Nov. 10. During an open house at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, friends, colleagues and family expressed sorrow and anger over the 34-year-old actress's suicide in late September.
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Woolly Mammoth artistic director Howard Shalwitz choked back tears speaking of Cassidy's "vitality and her optimism . . . but also her incredible insecurity," which, he said, bemused the rest of the company when she worked with them in the '80s, "because she had this towering presence onstage." Jennifer Mendenhall was moved by a video that showed her and Cassidy cutting up backstage at a long-ago Woolly production. "It's been so long since I'd seen her that happy," she said, weeping. More than one person spoke of the frustration of not being able to reach Cassidy through the despondency she'd shown in the weeks before her death.
Among the memorabilia in the lobby was a poem by Cassidy's younger sister Orlagh that ended with the lines "I will let you go in peace, for you will never leave my mind or my heart./ We shall sew our family together with love and you shall be the thread." Follow Spots
* Woolly Mammoth's production of "Brimstone and Treacle," the mystical tragicomedy by Dennis Potter, has been extended through Dec. 7. Director Tom Prewitt tells us that even weeknight performances have been packed. * Two original musicals premiere in the Washington area this month. "RoadRage," by Washington playwright and performer Elizabeth Pringle, with music by Christopher Forbes, opens tomorrow and runs through Monday at Mount Vernon College's Hand Chapel (call 202-625-4655). Described as "a darkly comic urban fairy tale," "RoadRage" is about a young woman who recalls the deaths of her parents in a car crash 20 years earlier. Dorothy Neuman directs a cast that includes familiar stage presences Buzz Mauro and Deb Gottesman and newcomer Samantha Talbot. * "Ms. Holiday's Blues," about the early career of legendary singer Billie Holiday, completes its debut run at the Publick Playhouse in Cheverly (call 301-277-1710) Nov. 28-30. Written and directed by Sidney Porter, who studied with Mike Malone at Howard University, the show focuses on Holiday's professional breakthrough, her troubled personal life and drug addiction. Faith Luster, another Howard grad, plays Holiday. It ends, says Porter, with the singer's 1948 triumph at Carnegie Hall. "Blues" is presented by Porter's Vision Entertainment Performing Arts Group. * Here's a tip if you attend "Slava Snowshow," Slava Polunin's funny, poignant, visually stunning Euro-Russian clown show at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (through Sunday): Be sure to hang around after the curtain call -- especially if you bring kids. (The center does not, by the way, recommend "Snowshow" for kids under 8; it might be too intense for them.) Our lips are sealed, except to say that things get kind of wild, and a beefed-up cleaning crew is required to make the place presentable again. CAPTION: Despite his clowning in a Tyrolean hat, Mark Boyett plays an uptight and arrogant piano prodigy who has lost his muse in "Old Wicked Songs," a play with a Holocaust subtext at the Studio Theatre.
