Three Pianos at American Repertory Theatre has prompted me to begin this review with a brief but important Public Service Announcement:

To all of the theatres who produce plays that run longer than 90 minutes, please be advised: Your play is not so special that it does not require an intermission. Your play is not so good as to live beyond the limits of bladder and stomach. Your play is not so fabulous that old men do not need to pee, and young women do not need to snack during its brilliance. If your play requires an intermission, please give it one. Especially if serving alcohol during the show.

That being said…  Three Pianos at American Repertory theatre is a play about three men in and out of German composer Schubert’s time experiencing a “Schubertiade.” What’s that? You don’t know what a Schubertiade is? Brief internet sleuthing tells me that indeed, this is a real word and not something the playwrights or A.R.T. made up to support the premise of this loosely strewn together play that explores . . . that delves into . . .

Well, I am not sure what to tell you about this play. I know that I was chastised by an audience member when I shared that I try not to read anything about the play prior to arriving at the theatre. I let the theatre itself – the program and the performance – influence my experience of the art. Did I receive the email from Diane Paulus with a lengthy guide to the play? No. Shouldn’t you read as much as you can about her brilliant vision for this play within the A.R. T. season? No. Haven’t you studied Schubert prior to coming so that you could recognize the musicians’ tampering with his work? Nope nopetty No.

I may never have attended a Schubertiade, but I have perhaps been accidentally involved in more than a few Shakesperiades – which I suppose would be intense conversations on the meaning of life centered on Shakespeare’s text.  This I know: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” The play is the thing that must move the audience. The play. Not the marketing, nor the blog, nor the email from the Artistic Director about her vision.

Three Pianos may have been more moving in its original incarnation at the New York Theatre Workshop, but that is not the production I am privy to review. This production seemed like a college play complete with trite ruminations from young men about love, adolescent hissy fits while drinking into a stupor, and design tricks that are straight out of an Introduction to Guerrilla Theatre textbook.  If neon lights shined on the audience and me one more time, I was quite certain that I would go blind. If yet another A.R.T. employee poured a glass of wine for the drunken man next to me, I was going to puke myself.  There was a lot of technical fluff on top of a play that was supposed to be about Three Pianos.

I’ve heard that the performances were moving in New York. In Boston, I could rarely hear them or understand them.  These playwright-producer-dramaturges were not adding enough “-actor” to their depiction and I found their performances flat—when I could hear or understand them.  The structure of the play itself was baffling or perhaps missing. I was once taught that the worst defense for poor play structure is, “But that’s the way it really happened!”  This whole play seems to be a series of moments that might have really happened, but they didn’t happen to me that night in the dark theatre. Actually, they didn’t happen to me that night in the neon-office-lighting-on-the-audience-to-make-a-point theatre.

I understood where this play was trying to go, and if I were to now regurgitate the marketing to you, I would tell you that this play is a drunken romp of youth centered on quintessential questions about the nature of love, life and death. That is what the play is supposed to be about, and I actually do think it is worth your time to go, drink a lot of red wine, and decide if get any of that out of this production.

-Mary ElizaBeth Peters