American theater experienced a mini-revolution in the 1970s with the modern introduction of the one-character play. “Clarence Darrow,” Henry Fonda’s portrayal of the famed Southern defense lawyer, and “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,” a nod to President Truman starring James Whitmore, would help fuel the craze that later included figures from Golda Meir to Susan B. Anthony to classical composers like Fryderyk Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven and modern music masters Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin.
You can’t tell Point Loma resident Hershey Felder anything about the last few. His one-man “Beethoven As I Knew Him” and “George Gershwin Alone” captivated Old Globe Theatre audiences several season ago, and his return San Diego engagements are part of a resume that includes worldwide solo presentations on pianists and their art. “The idea,” he’s said, “is to have the stage strewn with music from all the major songwriters and to let the members of the audience just pick their favorites.”
But while “favorites” is a subjective term, “relevance” requires strict adherence to critical expression and thought. Relevance is also what Felder says makes “The Pianist of Willesden Lane” such a timely bioplay — and prior to its Sept. 6 opening at San Diego Repertory Theatre, Felder noted the sobering World War II tale in the context of modern life.
The Felder-directed play is performed by Mona Golabek, whose novel “The Children of Willesden Lane” recounts the life of Lisa Jura, her mother. Jura was a piano prodigy who at age 14 escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 through the so-called kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought war-threatened children to the relative safety of London between 1938 and 1940. The play, which Felder adapted, opened in 2012 in L.A.
The musicianship is fueled by Edvard Grieg’s roily “Piano Concert in A Minor” — the piece was a topic of discussion as mom taught piano to her daughters Mona and Renee, and the book (co-authored by Lee Cohen and published in 2002) materialized from there.
L.A. native Golabek, herself a noted concert pianist, contacted Felder in hopes of some kind of stage collaboration. Thing was, she had no acting experience whatsoever — which is precisely why Felder thought the idea would work. “Trying to make Mona an actress,” 46-year-old Felder said, “is a mistake. She’s so very honest in her [portrayal], and my intent was to make her honest, not to make her act. This works because it’s a true story, and it’s all hers.”
“My mother told me that when the bombs started in England, she’d go down to the basement of the hostel and pound out the cadenza of the Grieg, determined to drown out the bombs,” Golabek said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview. Chords from Rachmaninoff would morph into a depiction of the D-Day bombing, with Jura creating army uniforms to the tune of a large-scale Bach entry. Jura died in 1997, having survived the Holocaust through her music alone.
“Lisa was one of the first children on the kindertransport,” said Montreal native Felder, who maintains a home in New York and is married to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell. “Because of that, the book and the play have a lot to draw from, and the story is much bigger in light of what we see in the world today. The world is a very dangerous place,” he said, adding that modern terrorism is only the latest in a legacy of violence and hate.
San Diego, Felder said, knows good theater when it sees it — audiences here “recognize the transparency in a great story and the way it’s told.” This piece, he asserted, is made for such a patronage amid the triumphs and failures of the human experience and the theater’s incomparable way of making them known.
“The Pianist of Willesden Lane” runs at the Lyceum Theatre, 79 Horton Plaza, through Sept. 28. For more, call (619) 231-3586 or see sdrep.org. — Martin Jones Westlin is editor of La Jolla Village News, a sister newspaper of The Peninsula Beacon.