Hot off the front pages -- well, at least the Arts pages -- comes the idea for Michael Hollinger's new play, Opus, presented at Philadelphia's Arden Theater. The real-life Audubon String Quartet dismissed its first violinist because of incompatibility. The man sued and won, as the judge apparently felt that all decisions in a string quartet must be reached unanimously. The remaining colleagues were forced to give up their name and forfeit their valuable instruments. Those three players are devastated emotionally and financially. Hollinger's play is about a string quartet in crisis as it replaces its violist on the eve of a televised White House concert.
The local playwright, 44, is a violist himself who once actually sat in with the Audubon. Professionally trained at the Oberlin Conservatory, he gave up playing music at age 22 and made a career in theater instead.
As a teenager, Hollinger attended an orchestra festival for high school musicians at Elizabethtown College in Central Pennsylvania, where the Audubon Quartet was in residence. This was only a short distance from York, where Michael grew up. "Hearing me and my friends playing chamber music," he says, "the Audubon invited us to join them in reading through the Mendelssohn Octet. It was a seminal experience for me."
The Audubon was founded in Pennsylvania in 1974 and achieved international recognition. Special appearances include a performance at the White House, and 26 years in residence at the Music at Gretna (PA) Festival. Hollinger already had decided to write a chamber music play when he heard about the controversy with the Audubon. There are some parallels in the plot, but the play is fiction.
As a kid, Michael acted in plays and built sets at the Little Theater in York. "I think my experiences there gave me a solid grounding in the mechanics of the stage -- that is, the sense of people interacting in space rather than on a page or movie screen -- and a visceral understanding of the stage's relationship to the audience."
While studying instrumental music at Oberlin, Hollinger wrote and produced one-acts and eventually a full-length musical. After graduation he put down his instrument and went on the road with a children's theater company. Later he entered grad school for theater at Villanova. His thesis project was a solo show which he wrote, directed and performed, and which won a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He met actress Megan Bellwoar in Pippin at Villanova, directed by Father Peter Donohue, who has just been elected president of Villanova. Father Donohue also married the couple.
After getting his masters, Hollinger was hired by Philadelphia Festival Theater for New Plays as Literary Manager and Dramaturg. "It was a great training ground for an aspiring playwright," he says, "reading thousands of scripts over the course of the next five years as well as working on dozens of new plays."
To supplement her income as an actress, Megan took a job in 1993 as assistant to the Arden's Producing Artistic Director, Terry Nolen. She gave her boss a copy of her husband's play, An Empty Plate in the Cafe du Grand Boeuf. Nolen says "I loved it and said I want to do it." That production was followed by a series of Hollinger plays that premiered at the Arden, directed by Nolen: Incorruptible (1996), Tiny Island (1997), Red Herring (2000) and Tooth and Claw (2004.) Nolen says: "It's clear that all Michael's plays are very musical in terms of rhythm and the use of silences. I tell my casts, `Follow the punctuation. Honor the rhythms û play the beats and pauses -- and the play will come to life.'"
Hollinger says he always writes his plays "with scripted beats and pauses, alternating between sections and an interplay of voices."
In 1996, Hollinger won the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theater Artist from the Philadelphia Theater Alliance. The $10,000 check allowed him to quit his day job as literary manager for another Philadelphia theater, the Wilma, and become a full-time, work-at-home writer. Well, not exactly. He and Megan had an infant son, so Michael, happily, did not really devote all his time at home to writing. Hollinger told the Haas jury that he was pleased that his success as a playwright provides jobs for large numbers of Philadelphians who are actors, set designers, costumers, etc.
For twenty years Hollinger did not play his instrument and did not keep in touch with the Audubon. Just last year he began to play viola again, privately, with a quartet near his home in Wyncote. He decided to write a personal, intimate play as a change of pace after his Red Herring and Tooth and Claw, both of which dealt with global issues and were set in exotic locales. "After big metaphors about life and evolution, now I want to focus on small interactions," he says; "a chamber play, and it turns out to be about chamber music."
In Opus, the cast is professional actors, not trained musicians, and stylized choreography is used to represent the playing. The Addison quartet from Curtis Institute supplies the actual music, which includes Beethoven, Bartok and a bit of "Hail to the Chief," on a pre-recorded tape.
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