Winner of 3 Ovation Awards

Best Ensemble, Best New Play, Best Lighting Design

OCTOBER 9th - NOVEMBER 17th, 2002
Los Angeles Theatre Center
514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles

a world premiere by Bryan Davidson	directed by Jessica Kubzansky
with Nancy Bell, Kevin Crowley, Tina Holmes, Jeremy Maxwell, John Prosky, Morgan Rusler, & Christopher Shaw
set design Susan Gratch	light design Jeremy Pivnick
costume design Elizabeth Palmer	sound design John Zalewski
assistant director Ross Kramer	production stage mgr Amanda MacIndoe Gratton
produced by Lauren Bass, Chris Fields & Jon Lawrence Rivera

The Composers


Chris Shaw, Jeremy Maxwell


Jeremy Maxwell, Chris Shaw, Nancy Bell


Jeremy Maxwell, Tina Holmes


John Prosky, Jeremy Maxwell, Kevin Crowley


Kevin Crowley, Chris Shaw, John Prosky


Kevin Crowley, John Prosky, Chris Shaw


Nancy Bell, Jeremy Maxwell


Nancy Bell, Jeremy Maxwell


Nancy Bell, Jeremy Maxwell


Nancy Bell


Nancy Bell


The Arm

The Composers





**RECOMMENDED**
October 31, 2002
Nominated for 3 LA Weekly Awards

Timely, heart-breaking and wistfully humanistic, Bryan Davidson’s play is a careful meditation on three composers, their respective masterworks and the effects that wartime had on each of them. There is no nationalistic hierarchy to Davidson’s Germans, Englishmen, Americans or Frenchmen. They are all equally victimized as either hungry prisoners in camps, amputees, faithless men of the cloth or worried mothers. These composers struggle to put their darkness, listing hope, devotion and memory of life into music, in a production passionately realized by director Jessica Kubzansky with her keen ensemble cast and designers. In the first and most developed of the three acts, composer Frank Bridge (Morgan Rusler), a pacifist sickened by censorship and the blind patriotism running rampant through England, composes a dark and belittled pastoral for his maestro pianist (Jeremy Maxwell), who’s just lost his arm in the muddy trenches of WWI. Act 2’s murder of Anton Webern (Chris topher Shaw) by an American military cook (John Prosky) in 1945 resonates on a nuclear family in North Carolina 10 years later, as Webern’s daughter (Tina Holmes) digs for faith and justice. The third and final act attempts to piece the previous two acts together in a ghost-of-Christmas-past scenario — with Maxwell playing composer Olivier Messiaen, and Nancy Bell leading him in the "Forest of Lost Things" as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. This coalescing could’ve been more subtle, but it carries the intentions of Davidson’s concept via a goofball French cellist (Kevin Crowley) and his prison-camp quartet mates (Shaw and Prosky), who chime in periodically to ease the tension.

-Wendy Gilmartin

 


**CRITIC'S CHOICE**
October 26, 2002

The first moments of "War Music," a new play by Bryan Davidson, are meant to evoke that delicious sense of anticipation before a concert: the swirling cacophony of the instrumentalists' warm-up, followed by the conductor stepping onto the podium, raising his baton and....

Just then, an air-raid siren screams.

It's a sobering bit of symbolism, inviting the viewer to think not just about war's disruptions but about all of the lives lost -- all of the music silenced forever.

How to endure that? In a haunting presentation by Playwrights' Arena and the Echo Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, "War Music" suggests that the truest counterbalance to so much destruction is to go on creating.

Like an orchestral work, the play is divided into movements, each inspired by the life of a composer -- Frank Bridge, Anton Webern and Olivier Messiaen -- during World Wars I and II.

The first movement charges into a WWI firefight that has pinned two British soldiers to the ground. One is a pianist, Douglas Fox (Jeremy Maxwell), a friend of Bridge's (Morgan Rusler). The battle claims one of Fox's arms, prompting Bridge to write the piano piece "Three Improvisations for the Left Hand," of which the "At Dawn" section, woven into the action, trembles with the promise of renewal.

Pondering Webern's accidental death at the hands of an American soldier in post-WWII occupied Austria, the second movement focuses not so much on the composer (Christopher Shaw) as on the GI (John Prosky), whose life is shattered by the event, and an aspiring musician (Maxwell) inspired by Webern.

The final movement is inspired by "Quartet for the End of Time," which Messiaen wrote while a prisoner of war in 1941. Awaiting a rehearsal of the piece, three fellow prisoner-musicians (Kevin Crowley, Shaw and Prosky) enact a comic "Waiting for Godot"-like routine while Messiaen (Maxwell) is led through the process of creation by Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows (Nancy Bell).

The play's gorgeously surreal visuals, staged by Jessica Kubzansky, reach their fullest expression here. Wandering through an ethereal forest (dangling strips of white fabric in Susan Gratch's set design, painted in dreamy pastels by Jeremy Pivnick's lighting), Messiaen gathers up all of the sorrow from the previous stories, mixes it with such timeless beauty as birdsong, and turns it into an enduring act of redemption.

-Darryl Miller

 


**CRITIC'S PICK**
October 23, 2002

Playwright Bryan Davidson's fine original script about the dramatic stories of three wartime musicians and composers gets an exquisite production by a gifted ensemble under the inspired direction of Jessica Kubzanksy. The play is divided into three "movements" that chronicle the travails of English pianist Douglas Fox, Austrian composer Anton Webern, and French composer Olivier Messiaen.

Fox has lost an arm to a wound and gangrene and is recuperating in a military hospital near the battlefield in Ypres, France. There he encounters an assortment of the physically and emotionally wounded, including a sociopathic patient, a morally spent doctor, a brave and self-sacrificing nurse, and an orderly who is a conscientious objector. These casualties of war, thrown together amid great suffering, are portrayed by Davidson as neither noble nor evil, but simply human.

The accidental death of 12-tone composer von Webern in post-war occupied Germany at the hands of an American private is the subject of the second movement: It enters tentatively into a world of spiritual loss as the son of an Austrian pastor seeks to escape the suffering of his small town and connect with Webern, his musical inspiration. Unfortunately, the boy's quest ends in Webern's death--but not before the suffering of post-war Germany is ripped into the open.

The final movement is set in a Nazi POW camp in Silesia, where Messiaen is slowly lost to the spirit world as he suffers not only the physical and psychological privations of the camp but also seeks against all odds to complete a musical composition to be performed by the prisoners. Led by Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Messiaen finally completes the haunting work.

While the subject matter and the form of Davidson's play require leaps of faith and imagination, they make for a captivating evening. The entire ensemble gives outstanding performances, most notably Nancy Bell, Christopher Shaw, John Prosky, Kevin Crowley, Jeremy Maxwell, and Morgan Rusler in multiple roles. Kubzansky's marvelously deft touch is everywhere, from the magical tone of the lighting and sound to the stellar pacing and tone of the performances. This collaboration between Playwrights' Arena and the Echo Theater Company is an auspicious pairing in the service of a terrific play.

-Hoyt Hilsman

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