Stereophonic
Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St.
New York City
Runs through 12/17
There’s a moment in Stereophonic — a mesmerizing new play by David Adjmi currently running at Playwrights Horizons — when Diana is alone in the recording booth. She’s laying down the lead vocals for a ballad on the band’s upcoming album. We have no idea what time it is, other than that it’s late – maybe 2 or 3 a.m. –- and Diana is losing steam. Peter, the band’s guitarist and Diana’s controlling boyfriend, micromanages every errant pitch from the control room as Grover, the engineer, adjusts the mix. Diana keeps missing the high note. Peter keeps criticizing her. With each passing take they get closer to snapping.
Diana wants to talk to Peter in the booth, in private. Diana motions to Grover, telling him to cut the audio to the control room, as she leads Peter out of sight. Grover hovers a hand over the console but doesn’t flip the switch. He hears everything – the digs, the charged pauses, the threats to break up. It’s bad. But then they get back to recording, and Diana hits the note. Her voice is raw and heart-wrenching, full of hurt from the fight we weren’t supposed to hear. It’s perfect.
Stereophonic is set in a 1970s music studio. The play follows a fictional, Fleetwood Mac-esque band on the verge of blowing up -– or blowing apart -– as they record their second album. Despite the epic, drug-fueled roller coaster the synopsis might suggest, the play fixates on the minutiae of the nearly year-long recording process. David Zinn’s hyper-naturalistic set echoes his approach, down to the pumpkin-toned shag carpets. It’s a play about the rise of a mythic rock band, but from the inside, it’s a play about a broken coffee machine, a fleeting attempt at sobriety, or the stray rattle of a snare drum.
The band in question is led by a young American couple: Peter (Tom Pecinka), a perfectionist with a tendency to steamroll the recording sessions, and Diana (a magnetic Sarah Pidgeon), the ethereal songwriter whose struggles with self-confidence. They’re joined by three Brits: Holly, a disciplined, sophisticated pianist; Reg, her husband and the band’s frazzled, listless bassist; and Simon (Chris Stack), the drummer who tries to hold them all together. On the other side of the booth, there’s Grover (Eli Gelb), an ambitious engineer who grows disillusioned, and his enigmatic assistant, Charlie (Andrew R. Butler).
Adjmi’s intricately-engineered dialogue has an intimacy that makes seeing Stereophonic feel like the luckiest kind of eavesdropping. Stereophonic throws the audience into the music studio without context, slowly revealing the histories between characters through a charged glance or a moment of easy banter. When Reg (an unhinged Will Brill) staggers into the studio too coked up to string a sentence together, there are years of information in the way Holly (a riveting, restrained Juliana Canfield) avoids him.
As the play goes on, it charts relationships as they develop and implode. Holly and Diana’s bond is particularly compelling as it grows from a two-person sorority to a lifeline. There are lots of plays inside Stereophonic, and one is about misogyny. Both in relationships with men who demand to be taken care of, Diana and Holly let each other be momentarily free. Alone, they can make fun of their bandmates and talk about buying their own condos, when it’s clear that they’re really grappling with the impossibility of female celebrity in a world that treats their artistry as accidental while calling the men around them geniuses. No matter how much Diana and Holly confide in each other, at the end of the day they’re left to fend for themselves.
Stereophonic runs a trancelike three and a half hours. While it probably should have been trimmed by about 20 – 30 minutes, it rarely drags until the second act. There, almost as if at a loss for how to end the play, Adjmi’s effort to drive the story to its breaking point -– a few screaming matches lean too far into rock band drama tropes for their own good — overpowers his otherwise delicate hand. It’s a testament to Daniel Aukin’s calibrated direction and the subtle, lived-in performances throughout the ensemble that the play maintains its taut documentary pacing as consistently as it does.
It’s also evidence of the play’s ingenious use of music. When the band plays their songs live from the recording booth, it’s clear why their stardom is in such close reach. The production’s original music by Will Butler has a melancholy dreamscape quality that makes them sound like never-before-heard ’70s hits and made me wish I could buy an album. (Alas, there is no album.) Stereophonic is distinctly a play, but the songs in it deepen character and further plot just as adeptly, if not more so, as they would in a musical.
As we watch the band behind the booth’s glass pane, their bodies act as ciphers for their thoughts. In each nod and sway, we reinterpret what each character revealed in previous scenes. They’re making music, but they’re destroying each other in the process. As Grover predicts toward the end of the play, they’ll never be in the same room again once the album is done. The pain is there in the songs — that’s what makes them good — but it’s immortalized as glory.
NEXT UP: I’ll be reviewing Merry Me, a new play by Hansol Jung at New York Theatre Workshop.
