A show about depression is returning to Piven Theatre Workshop and that’s happy news for playwright Sarah Ruhl and director Polly Noonan.
“Melancholy Play: a chamber musical” began life without music as “Melancholy Play,” and had its world premiere in 2002 at Piven. Noonan played the lead character, a bank teller named Tilly. The fascinating thing about Tilly is that strangers find her melancholy sexy — they all fall in love with her. When she unexpectedly becomes happy, life changes for her suitors. At the same time, Tilly’s hairdresser turns melancholic. In her case, there’s a very different reaction. She turns into an almond. Yes, an almond.
Ruhl said she wrote the play because, “I was thinking in an abstract way about how our culture views depression and melancholy. As an ancient category of emotion, melancholy was actually a venerative kind of emotion that lyric poets would write about. In our contemporary view, everything had been flattened, I felt, into a few of the emotions where you either had happiness or depression, and not this kind of in-between stage that could be fruitful.”
The playwright decided to change it into a chamber musical, “partly for fun,” Ruhl admitted. By what seems like a coincidence, she chose as a musical collaborator New York composer Todd Almond. Yes, Almond. Ruhl laughingly insisted, “Was it Freud who said, ‘There are no coincidences?'”
When Ruhl shared the script with Almond, he told her that the show should be almost completely sung through with a string quartet. “It was sort of a grand experiment,” Ruhl said.
The chamber musical was workshopped at 13P in Brooklyn and will be staged at Piven Theatre Workshop April 30-June 7.
“What I love about what Todd did is that the music heightens everything,” Ruhl said. “And I think melancholy is so hard to explain on a cognitive level that you almost need music to really experience it.”
“It’s a pleasure to perform but it’s not an effortless pleasure,” Noonan said, recalling her starring role 13 years ago. “It’s so silly and funny and joyful, although you can’t take anything for granted. When you read it on the page, you think, ‘That seems pretty straightforward,’ but it demands a certain amount of energy.”
This time around, Noonan has agreed to direct the show because, “I fell in love with the play as an actor,” she explained. “I met Todd Almond through Sarah. Then I heard from Sarah that she and Todd were going to collaborate. It was killing me that I was in Chicago when they were working on it. I was fortunate enough to be in New York and see the closing show of the 13P production.
“It’s such a marvelous, engaging, infectious piece,” Noonan said. She is grateful that she is collaborating with musical director Aaron Benham to stage this show that has five actors and five musicians.
“I love and respond to Sarah’s work,” Noonan said. “And it makes so much sense to have the Midwest premiere of ‘Melancholy Play’ where the play was first produced.”
Piven Theatre Workshop presents ‘Melancholy Play: a chamber musical’
7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays, May 2-June 7; Previews are 7:30 p.m. April 30 and May 1
927 Noyes St., Evanston
$15-$35
(847) 866-8049; http://www.piventheatre.org
