"Fiddling in the Dark"
While watching One Discordant Violin, a one-actor,
one-musician piece at 59E59 Theaters, I couldn’t help thinking of a thematically
unrelated show I’d seen the night before, Broadbend, Arkansas, even
though the latter is a musical and the former a play. Broadbend, Arkansas is
in two parts, each featuring one actor who sings and speaks while accompanied
by a musical ensemble. The actor in One Discordant Violin doesn’t sing
but the tale he tells is about music, and much of what he says is underscored
by a violinist.
 |
| Jacques Mindreau, Anthony Black. All photos: Carol Rosegg. |
The substance of each work is, essentially, a tale of past
events that led the characters to their present state. Broadbend,
Arkansas begins with a Southern black man narrating how he became
caught up in the Civil Rights movement. Its second act, years later, features the man’s now grown daughter, whose son has been beaten by the police; what she says represents how the movement’s goals remain unresolved. Remove the musical
background and each half could as easily be a short story as a performance.
With conflicts mainly remembered or internalized, their impact as drama is
greatly diminished.
 |
| Add caption |
One Discordant Violin is itself adapted from a short
story (“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One
Discordant Violin”), written by Yann Martel (Life
of Pi) and adapted by its star, Anthony Black. Black, codirector
of the 2B Theatre Company of Halifax, Canada, shared the direction with Ann-Marie
Kerr.
 |
| Jacques Mindreau. |
Its original music is by Aaron Collier and Jacques Mindreau,
the latter a violinist who not only accompanies Black’s performance but gets plenty
of stage time to display his virtuosity, including an opening sequence before
the play proper begins.
 |
| Anthony Black. |
The unit set, also designed by Black, shows a few folding
chairs surrounded by rubble in what once was a beautiful theatre but is now being
demolished. A background wall of translucent screens allows for haunting lighting
effects designed by Nick Bottomley and Anna Shepard, as well as multiple
projections created by Bottomley.
Once again, dramatic conflict is remembered rather than
experienced in the present as the unnamed speaker recites his story in the
first person, shifting voices (as in the first of Broadbend, Arkansas’s parts)
to represent other people. The story, though fictional, contains so many enticingly
authentic-sounding details it seems, at first, to be autobiographical rather
than made up.
The speaker, a Canadian, tells us of an experience he had in
the summer of 2001 (upped from the story’s 1988 but, oddly, with no connection
to 9/11), while visiting a friend in Washington, D.C. At the time, he was a feckless
young man with vague educational/career goals, leaning toward being a writer, perhaps
in the vein of Joseph Conrad, who inspires a dissertation on the genius of his
punctuation.
The man talks about envying his D.C. friend for having already
graduated from an elite college and made a career with the accounting behemoth Arthur Andersen, a
current client being Donald Trump, a reference that goes nowhere.
While exploring one of the city’s seedier neighborhoods he
noticed in the window of a barber shop an announcement for a special concert at
the (fictional) Merridew Theater by the Maryland Vietnam War Veterans’ Baroque Chamber Ensemble.
The program would include selections from Albinoni, Bach, and Telemann, along
with the world premiere of an unfinished concerto by an unknown composer, John
Morton.
 |
| Anthony Black. |
Although declaring himself ignorant about music (a claim the
narrative belies), the speaker’s writerly curiosity convinced him to buy a
ticket. In precisely detailed prose, he describes the seriously distressed
theatre, the vets running the concert, and, of course, the concert itself. The
latter provides Mindreau an ample showcase, supplemented by recordings of additional
orchestration (Aaron Collier did the sound design).
Despite the shabby surroundings and the amateur musicians, the
man’s initial skepticism was soon erased, especially as he found himself
overwhelmed with the beauty of Morton’s concerto, “mistakes” and all. He became
obsessed with Morton, who conducted his own composition, but turned out, surprisingly,
to be an alcoholic janitor with rather peculiar work habits. The narrative looks
back on what happened after the speaker tracked Morton down, and the eventual,
disappointing, fate of the concerto.
In the literary climax, the narrator reads the notes in
which he described what he deemed the remarkable quality of Morton’s music. The
words, while vividly crafted, are themselves a kind of concerto. There’s no way,
however, they can accurately describe a piece of music, which he heard only once, so that we can recreate
it in our minds, especially since what he’s describing is totally fictional. It’s
not as if he’s painting a word picture of something by Bach. What we get seems
little more than a pretentious attempt at synesthetic prose.
 |
| Anthony Black. |
One Discordant Violin, which runs around an hour and
10 minutes. touches on the transformative power of a work of art, even one as
flawed as Morton’s, as well as on the eternal conflict of art and commerce. In
the end, however, the initial hint at a potentially supernatural experience—as in
the discovery, via dark, deserted hallways, of a once-spectacular theatre in a
building without any outward signs of its existence—peters out and the narrator’s
epiphany, meaningful as it is for him, remains purely personal, lacking a significant
conclusion.
 |
| Anthony Black, Jacques Mindreau. |
Black’s performance is fine: honest, charming, and intense.
Mindreau’s musicianship adds considerably to the elegiac mood. Still, like Broadbend,
Arkansas, One Discordant Violin—even with such good performances—remains somewhat out of tune.
59E59 Theaters/Theater B
59 E. 59th St., NYC
Through November 24