NEW YORK, NY.- It’s an imperfect rule of thumb that musicals lift up and dramas drill down. So what do you call David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which does both?
You could rightly say it’s a play with music, emphasis on the “play”: In a little more than three hours it features just six songs, some of them fragmentary.
But that would be to shortchange the ingenious way Adjmi weaves sound and story into something as granular as it is operatic. Granular because the songs (by Will Butler) are not decorations but are elemental to the plot, in which the five members of a rock band spend a year of the mid-1970s writing and laying down tracks for an epochal new album while bickering over each riff and tempo. Operatic because what they wind up recording, however refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their heartache, betrayal and fury.
There is plenty of each in “Stereophonic,” which opened Sunday at Playwrights Horizons in a relentlessly compelling production by Daniel Aukin that has the grit of a documentary. In a way, it is one: If you know anything about the year Fleetwood Mac spent making the 1977 album “Rumours,” you will grasp the template at once, even though Adjmi has said he was inspired by many bands of the era after listening to Led Zeppelin on a flight to Boston.
Nevertheless, the bones are Fleetwood Mac’s. Like Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, the play’s Diana and Peter are an American couple, she on vocals, he on vocals and guitar. Like John and Christine McVie, the fictional Reg and Holly are British, he on bass guitar, she on keyboard and vocals. And like Mick Fleetwood himself, Simon is the drummer, playing Daddy to the others while missing his wife and actual children back home.
That they all behave childishly once aesthetic arguments arise is a given of the milieu. The constant drinking, toking and dipping into a big bag of cocaine don’t help, even if it’s part of the job of the two overwhelmed engineers (Eli Gelb and Andrew R. Butler, hilarious) to keep the sessions going at any cost.
But something is already wrong when the band arrives at the studio in Sausalito, California: The intimacy and blend so riveting in their music has not worked out as well in their lives. Reg (Will Brill, heartbreakingly unhinged) and Holly (Juliana Canfield) are evidently on the skids. Indeed, Reg is so cataclysmically strung out by the third day of recording he can barely walk; he looks like a drowned rabid squirrel. Holly and the rest of the band, who all live together in a house nearby, are past the breaking point of patience and exhaustion.
Drugs and sleep deprivation are the accelerants here, exacerbating Reg and Holly’s flip-flops of affection while undoing the couples who at first seem properly glued. Diana (Sarah Pidgeon) and Peter (Tom Pecinka) have been a couple for nine years, held together by mutual admiration and complementary flaws. (He’s a control freak and she’s insecure.) Even so, they too begin to crack. Peter’s volcanic temper erupts as Diana, gradually emerging as the group’s breakout star, gingerly tries to assert more independence.
By the time Simon (Chris Stack, suavely coiled) announces that his wife has left him, we begin to adjust to the depths toward which Adjmi has quietly been leading us, beneath the expert polyphony of his overlapping dialogue, the keenly imagined naturalism of the setting — David Zinn’s studio set is a multitrack wonder — and the nervy patience necessary to let characters come to their own boil.
That deep story is about the disaster of maleness, and thus of mating, behind the pop-rock revolution of the period. (The bicentennial vibe is firmly established by Enver Chakartash’s late-hippie costumes, including some wild peacockery for Simon.) And though Adjmi’s depiction of the men as stunted adolescents at first seems lightly satirical — the casual thumbing of Playboy in the control room, the engineers high-fiving each other over shared fantasies of oiled-up women reclining on Corvettes — the atmosphere eventually turns menacing.
When challenged, Peter, who fancies himself (and may be) the band’s best musician, rigidly defends a fraying idea of what you might call monaural masculinity. Women are accomplices, not equals: incomprehensible witches, strange in their sisterliness (the men are Cains and Abels) and artists only accidentally.
To the extent that “Stereophonic” dramatizes a victory of any kind it is in the way Diana (Pidgeon is riveting in all aspects of the role) inches herself away from Peter (Pecinka, too, is riveting) and at last defies him. Not without a price, of course. Another of Adjmi’s main interests here is in the tricky duality of music and, by extension, of art. However cathartic, writing and performing do not fix anything, the soul being too complicated for that. “I thought I was getting things out with the music because it’s so expressive and exhausting, but you don’t,” Diana laments. “It’s just a trick, all the conflict gets like submerged and hidden in some other weird pocket of your psyche.”
Or as Holly, beguilingly cool in Canfield’s portrayal, sums up: “It’s a torture to need people.”
Adjmi, first known for plays like “3C” and “Marie Antoinette” that push satire past the gates of surrealism and then push even further, works a new path here, after some years away from the stage. He is still very funny but now without the quotation marks, devoting himself in every playwriting way — thematically, dialogically, structurally — to real things emerging in real time. “Stereophonic” may even be slightly attenuated by its refusal to take shortcuts; I wouldn’t have minded a 20-minute trim, if only to keep the material from falling, as it does occasionally, into the gap between drama and miniseries. (It would make an excellent miniseries, though.)
The discipline is otherwise unexceptionable. Aukin’s staging, which carefully tracks the different worlds of the control room downstage and the sound room, protected by glass, behind it, supports the variations on revelation and concealment that make the play so compelling. Sometimes the control room is silent and we hear only the sound room, sometimes it’s the other way around; sometimes there’s dialogue between them on mics and sometimes a mic is surreptitiously left live to spy on people in an isolation booth. And though superior work from the sound designer, Ryan Rumery, and the lighting designer, Jiyoun Chang, help direct our ears and eyes, we have to assemble the story ourselves.
I don’t really understand how the cast (under the music direction of Justin Craig) did the same, but backward and from the inside out, all while playing their own instruments and singing richly enough to sell Butler’s songs. Whether barnburners with chunky hooks or dreamy reflections with rangy lyrics, those songs sound every bit like the pop hits they are meant to be — perhaps not a surprise from a former member of Arcade Fire, but a joy nonetheless.
However you want to categorize “Stereophonic” — perhaps a playical? — the great thing is that it doesn’t founder, as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide. The music justifies the long buildup, and the play, Adjmi’s best so far, is as rich and lustrous as they come. You could even call it platinum.
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‘Stereophonic’
Through Nov. 26 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
