Opus

The cast of “Opus,” from the left; Chris Clavelli, Rachel Burttram, Davies Giles, Brendan Powers and Tom Nowicki. COURTESY PHOTO A marriage between two people possesses its own unique joys and challenges.

Now imagine being married to not one, but three other people. That’s what it’s like to be a musician in a string quartet, some say.

It’s not just the amount of time spent together rehearsing performing and traveling, but the intimacy of creating music together. Members in a string quartet are intuitively aware of each other and communicate on a nonverbal level; while performing, they even breathe in unison.

“In a way, the performance is the medium that this intimate relationship exists within, just as on stage, two actors, through the medium of the play, can have a relationship that, in some ways, may be more intimate than their real-life relationships,” says playwright Michael Hollinger. “I think, because music is wordless, it’s closer to the expression of pure emotion, feeling without connotation.

The cast of “Opus,” from the left; Chris Clavelli, Rachel Burttram, Davies Giles and Tom Nowicki. COURTESY PHOTO “So when you look across your music stand and connect with another player who’s joining your melody line, for example, something passes between you, if it’s working well, that’s kind of unimpeded by the usual constraints of social interaction.”

Athletes on sports teams experience a similar intimacy, he says, working together intuitively, symbiotically.

Mr. Hollinger’s award-winning play, “Opus,” examines what happens to a world-famous string quartet when that careful balance and intimacy is disturbed. When the quartet is on the verge of playing a prestigious, televised concert at the White House, the violist disappears and they have to hire a new one, who’s talented, but unproven.

“Opus” plays at the Florida Repertory Theatre through Jan. 24, and is produced by the same creative team that presented “Dancing at Lughnasa,” “Doubt” and “Rabbit Hole,” including director Maureen Heffernan and set designer Ray Recht.

Mr. Hollinger knows the dynamics of string quartets firsthand; he studied to become a professional musician, receiving a bachelor of music in viola performance from Oberlin Conservatory. He was accepted into the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University, but realized he was burned out. He took a year off.

“Within about three months, I realized I didn’t enjoy it,” he says. “I certainly didn’t like practicing. The viola can be physically uncomfortable, because it’s a large instrument. I always had some physical discomfort. I didn’t love orchestra work, which would’ve been my likely career path. And I certainly wasn’t good enough to be a soloist.”

But throughout his entire music career, he’d also been writing.

“They were always stealing time from each other,” he says. “So, in a sense, it was really just owning up to being a writer.

“I left classical music for a secure job like playwriting,” he jokes.

Instead of continuing his musical studies at Carnegie Mellon, he went to Villanova University and earned a master’s in theater, where he is now an assistant professor of theater.

Known for plays such as “Red Herring,” “Tiny Island” and “Incorruptible,” in addition to “Opus,” his awards include a Harold and Mimi Steinberg New Play Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays, two Barrymore Awards for Outstanding New Play, the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Theatre Artist and a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award.

But when he started writing plays, he ignored the adage to “write what you know.” He set his plays in different locales and time periods, doing months of research to get the details exactly right.

“Having taught young playwrights for a long time,” he says, “I realized that there are essentially two poles that writers write from: those writers who begin with, ‘Wow, I’ve had this experience of this relationship or this insight, and I really want to write that, I want to communicate that.’ And there are other writers who say, ‘Look at that thing over there. Wow, that’s interesting. That world, those people, that situation way over there, is fascinating. I want to know more about that.’ I think it’s clear to me that I’m the second one.”

The challenge for both kinds of writers is to move towards the center, he says. Those who begin with autobiography need to “find the fiction that tells the truth more truthfully than the true story.”

So for example, he says, in “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams has the character based on himself work in a shoe warehouse, instead of being a shoe salesman. He gives the character of his sister a limp from polio, instead of struggling with schizophrenia, as his real-life sister did.

“He fictionalizes whatever he needs to fictionalize, to make a play that’s better, truer, and more impactful than reality,” he says. “That’s the challenge for writers who come from autobiography. The challenge for writers like me, who tend to begin in alien time periods or milieu, is to discover in the writing, how these stories and these characters are also deeply personal and in actuality autobiographical.”

“Opus” was the first time he began with a milieu close to his own: “middleaged, educated guys making their living in art in a major northeastern city,” is how he describes it.

“In some ways, the writing of ‘Opus,’ and its afterlife, have been felicitous,” he says. “It’s made me think about the ‘write what you know’ adage. Because I had to do less research, I didn’t have to immerse myself in a different period or language or geography, and it felt easier.”

Though he studied music in school, theater wasn’t foreign to him. His parents were very involved in community theater in York, Pa., and he also performed as a kid.

“I’m very grateful for my experience growing up in theater,” he says. His first role? Playing the mouse in “A Mouse’s First Christmas” in kindergarten.

Acting on stage gave him an education he couldn’t get elsewhere, he says.

I think you learn something about the relationship between what’s on stage and the people in the audience that you don’t get anywhere else,” he says. “You can’t learn it in school. You learn it by being in the presence of it live. It’s hard to describe. But what I think I learned over a long period of time is, what is the nature of the experience that passes between the stage and the audience. What is the nature of stage time, what is the nature of stage space? And it’s not about language.”

As a dramaturge who’s worked with many new plays, he can tell which ones are written by actors and which ones are written by novelists.

“In my experience, the actors take to it much more easily than the novelists,” he says. “They understand something essential about the nature of people on stage and what we demand of plays, versus what we demand of novels.”

As a child, he’d help his parents learn their lines.

“I was told to note any deviation from the script, a missing ‘a,’ ‘the,’ or ‘an,’ and what it taught me from very early on is that my collaborators, ideally, will pay attention to everything I put on the page, and that every single thing makes a difference.…. If I put enough clues in that people discover, that every time they look more deeply they find intentionality, they come to realize that nothing in the play is arbitrary.

“If you start to realize that something that you overlooked 10 times was there all along, I think you come to respect the script more and think, ‘Huh, I should pay close attention to everything on the assumption that the way it’s written, versus something close to the way it’s written, matters.’”

Though “Opus” was first produced in 2007, Mr. Hollinger had the idea 20 years ago, that it would be fun to write a play about a string quartet in which the dialogue was musical in the way chamber music is obviously musical.

“You play chamber music, and you realize that different instruments interact as characters,” he says. “They have qualities that are not unlike the qualities of characters in a play. And conversely, characters in a play interact musically, because language is inherently musical.

“I think of all my plays this way, but ‘Opus’ gave me the opportunity to make this part of the point, to make it obvious for an audience, and to deliberately enjoy the parallels between language and music. And by extension, it encouraged me, on a larger level, to look at musical forms. So solos: monologues. Duets: Elliot and Dorian’s duet about Bach. Four parts: quartet, where the four men discuss the same subject with their interviewer, or, in one or two places, where four characters speak heatedly at the same time. In a string quartet, that can be exciting and utterly harmonious at the same time. In the theater, where characters are speaking text, it’s inherently disharmonious, because they obscure each other. You can’t hear the individual line and the whole as you can in music.”

And in some ways, the string quartet in “Opus” is a metaphor for the theater, he says. “It’s live, it happens, then disappears. Its participants are utterly interdependent. And they are used up and employed in service to a work that may have been created hundreds of years ago that endures, even though their work is ephemeral.”

Keeping them interested

As an experienced playwright, what does he teach his students about the craft?

“It all begins with one principle,” he says, “and that is that the theater is demanding the impossible all the time. That the nature of human attention is to diminish over time, always. Every meal is less interesting three fourths of the way through than it is at the beginning. Every class, etc., unless we create artificial reasons for something to become more interesting over time. Which is what the theater has to do. Because it demands so much undivided attention, more than anything else, except film, which is very similar.

“So beginning with that conundrum, if we’re in the theater swimming against the current, going against the physical law of attention, what do we have to do to capture attention, sustain attention, and increase attention, as time passes? And it’s such an unrealistic goal that I think it lets students begin the process of humility.”

Yes, he acknowledges, all good stories, all drama, contains conflict.

“You need conflict…but you have to ask why, what’s special about it? Why do we need to be interesting in the theater? It comes back to me, what you’re asking of an audience. You’re asking them to give you a huge chunk of time, undivided.”

It’s unlike reading a novel, he says, where they can put the book down, or skip ahead, or go back if they missed something.

“The playwright says, ‘you sit in that seat, and maybe I’ll let you up to pee.’ ‘Opus’ doesn’t even do that, (it doesn’t have an intermission.) It makes huge demands, unrealistic demands.

“If you strive to be more interesting, we may keep the theater audience. You can’t afford to ever bore people.” 

if you go

>> What: “Opus” >> When: through Jan. 24, with previews through Jan. 7

>> Where: The Florida Repertory Theatre, 2267 Bay Street, in the historic Arcade Theatre in downtown Fort Myers, between Hendry and Jackson

>> Cost: $42 and $38, with preview tickets $25 and $20

>> Information: Call 332-4488 or go to www. floriarep.org.