Bookshelf #2

The Piano Teacher by Julia Cho

Production, 11-5-18, 4 pm, The Kitchen Theater

Directed by Diego Arciniegas

This play hit me so squarely in the solar plexis I was floored, no, I was flattened! From the moment Beth Dixon, as Mrs. K, walked on stage, I was utterly entranced, mainly because my defenses were down—the writing and acting were so convincingly natural. This talking woman was very ordinary, so like me. And she didn’t hesitate telling me this and I believed her. I sat and listened—though I was too high up in the seats to take a cookie from the plate she offered the audience—cookies we believe she baked herself, though we find out later at least some of her sugar treats come from a box. It didn’t take long, though, before I felt something, if not amiss, was surely adrift. Was she on the edge of dementia or simply an old woman overwhelmed by loneliness, a loneliness emanating primarily from the loss of her husband? This wasn’t unusual, was it? Women of her generation define themselves by their relationship to their husbands. But whether dementia or loneliness or both, I began to sense she was inching toward something about to happen I wasn’t prepared for.

And it came through two of her students. The first was a young woman, Mary Fields, played by Amelia Windom, who let her former teacher know something was truly not right in Mrs. K’s house. The piano lessons weren’t the only lessons being learned and what was taken in was more than the students and the teacher were there for. It was going on with Mr. K as they waited for their piano lessons. But Mary Fields let Mrs. K know this within acceptable perimeters of social efficacy—compassion for an lonely, old woman. It also prepares us (or sets us up) for what follows.

The second student was one with great musical potential, Michael, played by Matthew J. Harris, but who hadn’t reached the fulfillment of that promise. He seems to appear out of nowhere, like a sudden threatening storm, who reveals that what he had hoped for when he was young had been turned on end by circumstances beyond his control, influences which had warped his chances of becoming who he could have been. Or had he been inherently attracted to that which stole his youth, hope and promise? Is he an expression of a highly disturbed old man, Mr. K’s psyche after what actually happened to him during the war or is Michael a repository of atrocious stories to which he’s been attracted, even a potential sociopathic killer now on the brink of a spree. Whether any or all of these, he definitely has come to believe that he’s that which corrupted and defiled him in Mr. and Mrs. K’s house from the stories Mr. K tells him about his destroyed youth, the only survivor of a town of innocents slaughtered by the Nazis and Mrs. K’s supposed innocence to what is happening in her kitchen.

The genius of the play is how seamlessly I was catapulted from a living room conversation into a submersion of an unblinkingly brutal experience with evil. It was like having a coffee klatch with Ted Bundy’s wife who claimed her husband wasn’t really slaughtering the innocent because of the derangement done to him. How much did she know and hide? How much did she not care to know, ever know, about her husband’s made-up stories that symbolized the real murders?

The play is a tumble of layer upon layer of guilt repression, hidden secrets and terrible memories which fills us who watch (much like Mrs. K and her TV watching), with fascination at what the world gives us to see and hear but in which we find ourselves helplessly stuck as to what to do with what we’ve learned. I walked out of the theater with questions that followed me into my living room later, when I reached for the television clicker that turned on the nightly news—which could have just as easily been my computer and any number of news venues at my fingertips.

What happens when we do not face the monsters we have created in both our interior and exterior worlds? What do we think we are doing when we make these territorial wars that place us in the middle of atrocities that we are not equipped to handle, let alone endure, but we take on in order to survive? And then what do we do when we have no models or guides for life after the survival? What do we do when we are silent witnesses to our created monsters that live on within and without? What do we do with the dragon that fuels our imaginations and creative art? Do we fight the demons? Sit with them? Keep them from overtaking us through make-believe? Fairy tales? Television shows? Movies and the stories we tell each other over daily coffees?

These questions sound like the ones a screenwriter might ask while creating a script for a Gonzilla or Jurassic Park movie. But The Piano Teacher shows us clearly that ordinary life is filled with just such monstrosities that do breed demons within. It is a story of every man and woman who lives today, who sit and watch the news on television and don’t know, perhaps don’t care to know what to do with the information of eighteen thousand murders that occur each year in our society as both entertainment and reality.* What do we do with the knowledge of all the atrocities everywhere?

The America we live in is no haven from atrocities elsewhere. Atrocity dwells in any place we live without awareness and truth and the will to act against it. And herein lies the dilemma. To work to eradicate it means a never ending battle that takes us from our ordinary lives, our personal desires and goals, our comfort zone, but without balance our resistance can eat us alive. It’s why, in the end, when Mrs. K. faces us with her resolve, we can’t with self-justified correctness tell ourselves we fight the good fight and aren’t anything like her. We are like her, but not only her. In this play we come to know that we are convincingly, horrifyingly like them all—each and every one.

*17,250 murders in the U.S. in 2016; around 11,750 violent acts witnessed on television each year by age 17.