Go to a play called The Kreutzer Sonata, and you expect to hear some music. You might have read about Renaissance Theatreworks’ production of Nancy Harris’s drama, which includes two musicians playing excerpts of Beethoven’s violin sonata. Or you might know the Leo Tolstoy novella on which the play is based, in which two of the main characters are musicians who are fond of Beethoven’s piece.
But there is music in Renaissance’s fascinating production long before you hear a strain of violin or piano. It comes from the voice of Jim Pickering, the sole actor, who finds gorgeous and charged melodies in Harris’s prose.
Pickering’s skill as an actor is nothing new to those who have seen him on Milwaukee stages over the last 40 years. He’s played Scrooge and Joe McCarthy; Larry Shue’s Nerd and Tolstoy’s Count Karenin. Here, he plays one of the most enigmatic and fascinating characters of his career—Pozdynyshev, a man who seeks forgiveness from strangers for his unspeakable crime.
Tolstoy’s Pozdynyshev is a somewhat different animal than the character Harris puts on stage. He rails against love, marriage and women like a sociopath out of Strindberg, spinning his story in eighty pages that swerve between philosophical misogyny and vitriolic self-contempt. He is no less the madman in Harris’s version, though the need to spin a tight, theatrical story makes her pare down the philosophical flights and hew more tightly to the events at hand.
Which leaves much of the character work to the actor, and Pickering does not shirk his responsibility. At once demurely polite and self-effacing, his Pozdynyshev ingratiates himself with a charming eccentricity. And Pickering layers the performance so we see Pozdynyshev’s need for the attention of his audience along with his dazzle and self-confidence. As he draws us in, he draws into himself as well, recalling the events of his crumbling marriage that eventually end in violence.
Harris helps the character along on this journey, punctuating the monolog with snippets of the sonata that plays a significant role in the story’s tragic conclusion. The visions—both sound and image—haunt Pozdynyshev on this train ride, materializing in echoes and ghostly tableaus. Colleen Schmitt and Joseph Ketchum play the excerpts beautifully (the script doesn’t specify specific passages, but music director Jill Anna Ponasik, perfectly matches character, mood and music).
Midway through the monologue, Pozdynyshev sits back in his seat, opens a thermos of tea, and listens to an extended passage from the sonata. Our attention is directed to the musicians of course, but Pickering doesn’t let us forget that this is all a creation of Pozdynyshev’s mind. You can almost see the thoughts materialize, a counterpoint to the music, but clearly something that lives on in the haunted man’s memory.
