From the profile of Jane Fonda in
The NY Times. The new Moises Kaufman play,
"33 Variations," is currently showing at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in NYC.
“33 Variations” is about a woman who is in many ways the complete opposite of Ms. Fonda — someone who has shut down and is out of touch with herself. Ms. Fonda plays a character named Katherine Brandt, a musicologist who is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and is determined
before she dies to solve the mystery of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations: why he spent the last years of his life obsessing over an ever-expanding set of variations on a waltz theme, written by the music publisher Anton Diabelli, that was clunky and banal. Beethoven called it a schusterfleck, or so the story goes — a cobbler’s patch. (Beethoven is a character in the play, along with his assistant, Anton Schindler, but his music is played offstage by Diane Walsh.)
Distant and controlling, Katherine also has a difficult relationship with her daughter, Clara (played by Samantha Mathis), and the eventual thawing of it, Katherine’s opening herself up, proves to be the key to the musical mystery. On the one hand, Katherine fits neatly into the long Fonda tradition, going back to “Cat Ballou” and even “Barbarella,” of women who are tough and self-possessed. But unlike, say, the
seemingly buttoned-up Gloria Beatty, Ms. Fonda’s character in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” or Bree Daniels, the prostitute turned sleuth in “Klute,” Katherine doesn’t seem to have that Fonda-like inner edginess or hint of stridency. She’s such a perfectionist she has erased even that.
From the profile of Jane Fonda in The NY Times. The new Moises Kaufman play, "33 Variations," is currently showing at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in NYC.
