ARTS REVIEW: '33 VARIATIONS'

Jane Fonda a Remarkable Woman Who Seems to Have Outfoxed Time

By: Clare Elfman

February 3, 2011

(Ahmanson Theater - Los Angeles, California) As Jane Fonda walked out onto the stage of 33 Variations at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theater, I thought: How can this be the same actress who charmed me back in 1962 as the bubbly over-talkative young nurse who finds herself on an “unconsummated” honeymoon with a nervous war vet in Tennessee Williams’ comedy, Period of Adjustment? She had a “bouffant” hairdo and her little makeup case that was so '60s, and she fluttered and fussed as she tried to understand the boy she had married. This is 49 years later, and the woman who stepped out onto the stage was young, slender, and absolutely vibrant. Her long career in film, her active political life, her world as a major exercise guru, and now a career on the stage...she had successfully survived the “variations” in her own astounding life.

On film, I’d seen the young and wildly sexy Jane in that hoot of a sci-fi comedy Barbarella, her dramatic and moving performance in China Syndrome, and my favorite of all was her role as the cynical psychiatrist in Agnes of God, and here she was onstage as the mortally ill musicologist who had become totally obsessed with Beethoven’s 33 variations on a simple waltz written by a talentless music publisher.

In fact, it was the obsession of the playwright, Moises Kaufman, in those variations--in why the master should have written not one as was requested, but 33 variations on such an unimportant waltz--that led him to juxtapose Beethoven’s obsession with a dying woman’s obsession with the same question.

Fonda plays Dr. Katherine Brandt, who has come down with early symptoms of Lou Gehrig’s Disease--what they call an “orphan” disease, not enough interest by the drug companies to develop a drug to combat it. Kaufman cleverly plays the idiosyncratic aging Beethoven against the dying researcher who would rather spend her last days probing an academic dilemma than try to relate to her daughter, who wants a relationship with a mother who cannot or will not relate.

The unusual and effective staging was done with moving walls of manuscript paper and files which open and close, shifting between early 1800s and the present, between Beethoven and his faithful and frustrated assistant who struggles with his master’s unexplained fascination with this simple waltz. He shares the question with the musicologist who asks: is he doing the variations to earn more money, to make fun of the publisher who has composed it, or is he truly fascinated with the simplicity of a German beer-hall waltz? 

Dr. Brandt is ill, not much hope for her recovery, yet she rejects her daughter who wants this time with her mother. In Bonn (where Kaufman himself went to research the same question), she meets a sympathetic woman who presides over Beethoven’s notes; the two become bonded friends--as bonded as Dr. Brandt can be with anyone. Her daughter follows her and tries to help her through her last days.  

It is through her German friend that the professor becomes aware of her own inability to reach out to her daughter. The theme reminded me of Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the reconciliation in illness of the estranged father and son.

The play is engaging and entertaining, but most fascinating is Fonda. I put her in the category of enduring women of the stage and screen, like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith--the difference being that those two have aged and Fonda has not. Shall we put this miracle to the years of exercise? Maggie Smith recently played the role of the dowager whatever-her-royal-name-was in a recent Masterpiece Classic--the part of an old woman. Judi Dench, even back in 1998, played Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love--an aging Elizabeth. Fonda doesn’t age. Exercise rules, shaming all of us aging sludges! Yes, she confessed on Oprah’s show that she had a “little face work done,” but no little work is going to do what exercise did for that youthful body.

Her performance was crisp and controlled, as is her familiar voice, but the passion comes through as the obsessed woman who, facing death, refusing self-pity or regret, focuses instead on a project which consumes her as her body deteriorates. Moises Kaufman gives her an opportunity in the final scenes to rise from her almost frozen state--a woman barely able to speak, to return in fantasy to her younger, vibrant self--a chance for us to see the two selves and the scope of her performance.

The wildly idiosyncratic Beethoven was delightfully played by Zack Grenier. Samantha Mathis plays a daughter who disappoints her mother by not being academically dedicated to perfection. The male nurse who accompanies the daughter is Greg Keller, a part played in the New York version by Tom Hanks’ son Colin in his major stage debut. Susan Kellermann plays the coldly officious woman who guards Beethoven’s papers--a woman who slowly becomes a friend of the dying woman, a nicely nuanced transition.

And thoughout the play, excellent pianist Diane Walsh performs the music as it’s discussed.  

33 Variations is a good night of theater--a solid, engrossing play ingeniously weaving two parallel stories and displaying the talents of a remarkable woman who seems to have, through her years of exercise and self-discipline, outfoxed time.