Jon Marans couldn't have asked for a more enthusiastic response to "Old Wicked Songs," his first major success as a playwright. The play won high-profile awards in New York and Los Angeles and was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1996.
An oddity among plays, "Old Wicked Songs" revolves around an intricate piece of music, Robert Schumann's song cycle "Dichterliebe." Through the analysis and performance of the song cycle, a burnt-out Jewish American piano prodigy and his emotionally distraught Austrian piano teacher learn to deal with their respective demons.
The play, a coup for Marans, opened at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater and later moved to the Jewish Repertory Theater in New York. It tallied more than 200 performances in an off-Broadway run at the Promenade Theater, but as is so often the case, the playwright's signature success eventually felt more like a shackle.
"About five years ago, I was starting to feel like the play was a drag on me," Marans said in a recent interview at Fulton Opera House, where the show opens Thursday. "I went to a lot of productions for a while because I was the original music director. ... But then I really got sick of the play. So I stopped going for a while, quite a while."
Spending time away from the play gave Marans a fresh perspective on an intensely personal work.
Based on Marans' own excursion to Austria as a young man of 20, "Old Wicked Songs" is set against the backdrop of the 1986 presidential election that brought former Nazi Kurt Waldheim to power.
Growing up in Silver Spring, Md., Marans, who's "not remotely religious," was more interested in assimilating to suburban life than exploring his Jewish heritage. His trip to Austria shocked him into an awareness of his cultural identity.
"As much as you hear racist remarks in the United States today is as much as you heard anti-Semitic remarks. It was that common, which was startling.
"This woman who was the head of the school that I was going to in Vienna, she wanted me to come to her chalet ... and I said I was going to go to Dachau (the former Nazi concentration camp) instead because I wanted to see it, and she said, 'Well, what do you want to see that for? It's just a bunch of dead Jews.'
"I didn't know what to say. I'm 20 years old. I'm here in a strange country. She's the authority figure. It was very confusing."
Marans' Jewish identity, though he's made very little effort to cultivate it, obviously affects his work. In his plays, Marans writes constantly about Jews. His latest work, "A Strange and Separate People," looks at how Orthodox Jews deal with homosexuality within their community.
But "Old Wicked Songs" is about more than the cultural divide between a Jewish musician and his teacher. The inner turmoil these men face as a result of their individual loves and losses, Marans said, plays a much greater role in the play, and music is the device that lays bare their emotional wounds.
Schumann's song cycle, based on poems by 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine, is about falling in love, losing love and then dealing with the loss. Heine wrote the poems in his early 20s, and they possess a young man's ardor.
"And so Schumann, when he wrote the music and selected the poems and the order of the poems, he was an older man," Marans said. "So what it has is an older man's perspective on a love affair that has gone wrong. ... In the play, the kid is like Heine, like those young angry lyrics, and the professor is more like Schumann."
When a director invites Marans to give input on a production, as Fulton artistic director Michael Mitchell did, he doesn't concern himself with line readings. Instead, he tries to help the actors understand the play through the music.
If anything accounts for the play's longevity, Marans said, it's not the Pulitzer tag; it's the score.
"I think it's the music that keeps it going. There's something haunting about this. ... 'Old Wicked Songs,' to me, is about the demons that are inside of us — not so much the historical demons that are hanging over the play, but the things inside of us that we can't let go of. And how do we let go of them? Through music, sometimes, that's a possibility."
"Old Wicked Songs" opens Thursday at Fulton Opera House, 12. N. Prince. St., and runs through May 13. For ticket information, call 397-7425 or visit www.thefulton.org.
