Variations On Humanity

Shannon Webber and Bob Hart both have big shoes to fill in the University Theatre production of Moises Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” opening tonight.

Hart is playing Ludwig von Beethoven at the end of the composer’s life, when he is going deaf and perhaps a little bit crazy.

Webber is basing her character, a modernday Beethoven-obsessed musicologist named Katherine Brandt, on her mother.

“Katherine is in her late 50s, and I’m ... not,” says the 24-year-old actress. The character is also struggling against the onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, adding depth to Webber’s challenge in what she calls a “powerhouse role.”

“If this was my mother, how would she deal with this?” Webber says she asked herself. “I just kind of put myself in her shoes. She’s strong and she’s brave - there would be that moment of doubt, what Katherine calls a ‘moment of trepidation’ - but she would push through.

That’s just the woman she is.

“She is the person I modeled Katherine after.”

Webber also met with people dealing with the disease through a local ALS Association support group.

“I really wanted to do justice to this character,” she says. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to show properly the process of ALS. What they wanted me to know is that each person experiences this disease differently. They wanted me to know that my experience as this characterwould be completely a solo experience.”

As a musicologist, Katherine has studied voraciously the 33 variations Beethoven wrote on a “not so good piece of music” by Anton Diabelli, director Amy Herzberg explains. Her obsession has consumed her life, and it seems it will also consume the time until her death - or perhaps she’ll spend the time building a relationship with her daughter, Clara.

“The actual structure of this piece is so imaginative,”COURTESY PHOTO ASHLEY COHEA Musicologist Katherine Brandt (Shannon Webber) finally meets her muse, Ludwig von Beethoven (Bob Hart) in “33 Variations.”Herzberg says. “Part of the concept is that variations slow down time. You take a tiny piece of the original theme and pull it out so you can examine it in extreme detail, and this is comparing that to life, sort of like ‘Our Town.’ You have two people who have declining health, and they both feel they have so much more they want to do, they’re trying to slow down time in the same way the variations do.”

Hart is the other half of the dance, as the play steps between the early 1800sand modern times, also chronicling Beethoven’s desire to finish his work as illness and madness claim his genius.

Hart says he started the creation of his character by “honoring” Kaufman’s script, “but Amy is big on research.” So the actor also read three biographies of the composer and several smaller works about him.

“I feel like I know him pretty well now,” he says.

“So much about his life isn’t explored in the play, but it’s good to know as much as I can about the character.”

In “33 Variations,” Hart says, Beethoven is “tortured and suffering.” In his favorite scene, he is composing a fugue, and “Amy sees it as a metaphor for his life and his impending death. So in this 1 2 /2 minutes, he’s experiencing his whole life and growing to accept the fact he doesn’t have much left. It’s very draining on an emotional level. But Amy is really good about taking you to the dark places - and not pushing you over the edge.”

Herzberg admits audiences may find themselves in tears, but she says the play is full of beauty, humor and music, too.

“Moises Kaufman says that one of the characters in the play is the music,” Herzberg explains, “and it’s really amazing to see the music come to life and interact with the characters.

“A lot of the piece is actually sort of choreographed with the music, either verbally or physically,” she adds. “It’s really added to the excitement of an enormously heartfelt, generous, moving script - and the challenge.”