The Hunchback Variations’ Mickle Maher and Mark Messing
More Interview
Theater Oobleck, easily the most cerebral absurdist theater company (or absurdist cerebral company) in town, presents one of its most unlikely aesthetic and formal pairings of the company’s history. It all began with a single, famously impossible stage direction from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: “Coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away.” Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations takes as its premise a panel discussion between the Hunchback Of Notre Dame and Ludwig van Beethoven about their failure to produce this sound—in part because they are both deaf, in part because Beethoven, it turns out, never finished the play, but perhaps also due to self-sabotage by the two anti-heroes. The entire play is a debriefing of this failure, by turns quietly contemplative and startlingly funny.
And if The Hunchback Variations, which consists of 11 vignettes in which Quasimodo and Beethoven meditate on their failure, wasn’t heady enough, the play, which has been performed to ecstatic and/or confused reviews in Chicago, D.C., St. Louis, and abroad in Germany, has found a new incarnation as Oobleck’s first opera, opening this week at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre. The A.V. Club spoke with playwright Mickle Maher, author of the now-libretto, and composer Mark Messing (of Redmoon and co-founder of Mucca Pazza) about their own artistic collaboration and why opera suddenly seems to be so popular.
The A.V. Club: Why an opera? And what’s it like writing an opera for the first time?
Mark Messing: Well, we actually wrote our first opera together for a private party a few years ago. I was asked if I could write “something cool, like an opera.” I said sure and called up Mickle, who had been thinking about Don Quixote, so we wrote a Don Quixote.
Mickle Maher: The Eagles played after us. It was quite a party.
Messing: An opera is basically a special way of telling story with music, because of variation and form that structures the story that unfolds. When we started, I hadn’t written a lot for the voice, though I had done a few musicals, so it was a new art for me. Now I have a hard time not writing for lyrics.
Maher: He knows how to put interesting music to large words, which is important for this play.
Messing: I love soul songs and spirituals, and I love hearing someone open their voice, but I could never write for voices to save my life. I had to discover the rhythm and the breathing of it. I’ve been a wind player all my life, so music was always about breathing to me, but you have to find a rhythm of breathing in language, as well as for opera finding a word whose meaning is defined by a few words after and before. You also have to learn how not to let the music give away the meaning too early.
AVC: When did you decide that The Hunchback Variations should be an opera, and why?
Maher: I was mowing my lawn, which is where I get a lot of my stupidest ideas, and this was the idea: “Should we apply for a grant to make Hunchback into an opera?” It made me laugh, so I called Mark. We got the grant, which was sort of a big surprise.
Messing: The play has 11 variations and each one has a different tone, energy level, and a different amount of tension—
Maher: —And individually, Beethoven is really optimistic. Quasimodo is the opposite, and more extreme—
Messing: So for me the other jumping-off point was thinking of these great characters. Between Beethoven, Quasimodo, Chekhov, you’ve got these giants of Western culture, and so I started playing with the style of music by referring a little bit to Beethoven’s period and Chekhov’s period... and some religious overtones from the church in Quasimodo’s time. There was some strange, really Middle Eastern flavor to church music in that century. The beautiful thing about the play is that the rhythm and language decays throughout, so it was inspiring to think about forms breaking down, but the piece goes on. It’s not a variation in the strict musical sense of word; it’s got varying form rather than themes.
AVC: There seems to be a deep irony built into the opera in that this is an opera about failure told after the fact. In a way, it’s the opposite of an epic.
Maher: Yes, absolutely. In one way the story is hyperbolic, very operatic, and I guess the juxtapositions could be described as epic. But it’s also very mundane, and you have these operatic characters who are constrained by a very boring set.
Messing: I found myself regulating the dynamics of the piece a little bit. There’a certain level it’s not going to go above.
Maher: Their passion is in the part where Quasimodo gets angry at Beethoven, but there’s no action. Or there’s soft action, but it’s very subtle. It’s not designed to rouse you in the same way that listening to an aria would.
Messing: The variations are more of a series than a plot, a little like being caught in a time loop. Each variation is history repeating itself, with characters trying to push the action forward. We remember only a shred from the one before.
AVC: What about the perceived difficulty of opera? Are you worried about your fans getting turned off by the form?
Maher: I guess that for people who don’t like opera they might think, “Why are people singing? What’s the point?” I feel sympathetic, but I think here there’s a reason for the singing. It feels right. They’re singing because they’re Beethoven and Quasimodo, and they’re working on sound. It’s already intrinsic to their natures that they would express themselves this way.
Messing: They always sing. That’s the only way they know how to communicate. As far as the audience, there’s definitely an onus on me. I love melody and rhythm and repetition, and so I’m trying to create that out of this prose... When I’m reviewing the piece and the progress I try to be critical. Is it interesting and songlike?
Maher: But as we were talking about before the interview, there’s a new interest in opera among new, wider audiences more generally. That’s kind of weird in this recession because opera is not a cheap form. If you’re getting professional singers you’re going to be paying money.
AVC: Do you have any theories for its newfound popularity?
Maher: Maybe in life before YouTube, it was hard to share something. Recently I was struck by this gorgeous piece of Agee that one of my opera geek friends shared—not only the sharing of the piece but the immediate discussion about it was exciting. There’s something to that. [Laughs.] The Internet helped the Arab Spring, maybe helping Opera Spring, helping people getting excited on an intimate level.
But also opera is a natural extension of fringe theater. It’s immediately fun, and as a writer it gives your words superpowers immediately, like a shot of adrenaline you can’t get any other way. Maybe it’s because you have to have high production values if you’re going to do a fringe opera piece. Fringe theater artists are interested in doing the whole hog... the excess appeals to us.
The Hunchback Variations Opera runs Jan. 25 - Feb. 19 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.
