True Genius in "The Piano Teacher"

In the weeks before the writers' strike shut down TV production, television execs were patting themselves on the back and boasting that, unlike the movies where a woman over 30 is considered long in the tooth, several TV series were giving older actresses a place to show off their talent. But, out of the women they were talking about—Glenn Close (a ball-busting lawyer on FX's "Damages"), Mary Louise Parker (a middle-class drug dealer on Showtime's "Weeds") Holly Hunter (a dysfunctional cop on TNT's "Saving Grace"), Kyra Sedgwick (a quixotic cop on TNT's "The Closer"), and Vanessa Williams (a narcissistic fashion editor on ABC's "Ugly Betty")—only Close is currently eligible for an AARP card.

Theater is different. One of the reasons I love it is that women of all ages (and sizes, shapes and ethnicities) can—and do—strut their stuff on its stages. Right now, Debra Monk and Karen Ziemba are kicking up their heels in Curtains. Sinéad Cusack is giving two kick-ass performances in Rock 'n' Roll. Phylicia Rashad, who has only come into her own in the past decade even winning the Tony in 2004, is in previews in Cymbeline. And, of course, the whole premise of Mamma Mia! pivots around a boomer-age mom and her pals.

I thought about all of this after watching the hands-down best performance I've seen this year: Elizabeth Franz in Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher. Although some theatergoers will remember her as the original unctuous nun in Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You and Franz first knocked me out in her Tony-winning performance as Linda Loman in the 1999 revival of Death of a Salesman, she isn't a big name. But she is a big talent. She's also 66.

And that's fitting because Cho's play tells the story of a retired and widowed piano teacher who, out of loneliness, tries to reconnect with some of her old students to find out why in one particular year so many of them stopped taking lessons. The two who show up—the very good Carmen M. Herlihy and the young and very promising John Boyd—bring with them unsettling answers that force the teacher to confront truths she has spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

Director Kate Whoriskey hits every chord of tension in the piece, which runs just under 90 minutes. She is ably assisted by Derek McLane's cozy, yet slightly creepy, set; and Obadiah Eaves' subtlety unnerving sound design. But it is Franz who makes the show worth a trip down to the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street, where the run has been extended until Dec. 23. Her Mrs. K, as the piano teacher is called, is a complete person and Franz makes you feel every emotion she experiences.

Many of those feelings are disturbing because the play is intentionally ambiguous, allowing the viewer to bring her or his own nightmares to its mysteries. Cho totters at times on this ambitious tightrope she has set for herself but she is a playwright to be watched and supported. A Korean-American, she includes Asian characters in all of her works and yet race and politics seldom take center stage but, rather, add undertones that accentuate the commonality of human experience. And at just 32, Cho has created a master role that older actresses will treasure for years to come (click here to read an interview in which she discusses the genesis of The Piano Teacher).

Cho isn't the only playwright who has recognized the inherent drama that can be mined from centering plays around such characters. Contemporary writers from Horton Foote to Tom Stoppard have created big, juicy roles for actresses who are mature enough to bring a lifetime’s worth of experience and skill to those parts.The jobs don't pay as well as playing cops and robbers or comic foils on TV but the pay off—for the actors and their audiences—is richer.

Rockin' With Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll

There was a time in the 1960s when you could tell a lot about a person, or thought you could, by the rock bands he or she liked. Everyone loved The Beatles; it was the others that defined you. I split my loyalties between the arty surreality of Jefferson Airplane and the soulful loopiness of Sly & the Family Stone. The boy I loved was in thrall to Jimi Hendrix. My best friend was mad about Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. I knew people who worshiped The Doors, who adored The Rolling Stones, who idolized The Who and who were simply fanatic Deadheads. Apparently Tom Stoppard's bands of choice were Pink Floyd and a reluctantly rebellious Czech group called The Plastic People of the Universe. Both play pivotal roles in his thought-provoking new play Rock ‘n’ Roll about the Sixties, the revolutions it spawned, and the promises they did and didn't fulfill.

I didn't think Rock 'n' Roll was so wonderful while I was sitting there trying to get through its first act. There was so much to absorb about the cranky Cambridge professor, played by Brian Cox, who refuses to renounced communism even after Nikita Khrushchev had revealed Stalin's horrors during the purges of the 1930s and the Soviet Union had cracked down on Hungary's bid for independence in 1956. And about the professor's classics scholar wife, played by Sinead Cusack, who specializes in the poetry of Sappho and wages a fierce battle against cancer. And about the couple's hippie daughter, played by Alice Eve as a young girl and as a middle-aged woman by Cusack. And most especially about the professor's young Czech protégé Jan, brilliantly portrayed by Rufus Sewell, who loves the west and rock music but returns to his homeland shortly after the Soviets sent in tanks and troops to crack down on the reformist Alexander Dubček, whose election had set off a heady but ill-fated period that would come to be known as the Prague Spring.

You usually have to drag me out of my seat at intermission but I couldn't wait to get up after the first 90 minutes of Rock 'n' Roll. It was unseasonably cold outside and so my buddy Bill and I huddled together in a little niche at the back of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre and commiserated about the fact that even though we both had admired Stoppard's nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia last season and thought we were reasonably smart people who were aware of the momentous events of 1968, including the Prague Spring, we weren't having a good time. Others seemed to share our dismay. A few, including the people sitting right in front of us, left. "Oh," said Bill, "there's Nathan Lane walking out with his coat on. I wonder if he's coming back?" He did. Bill and I returned to our seats too. And how glad I am that we did. Just a few minutes into the second act, almost all the things I hadn't understood began to make sense and to emerge as a fascinating commentary on a tumultuous time.

It's become quite trendy for people to be rueful about the '60s. And there are traces of that in Rock 'n' Roll. But Stoppard being Stoppard, it doesn't stop there. The playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia, left before he was 2 and was raised in England from the time he was 9, has said Jan is his alter ego, the person he might have been had he returned to his native country. The play ends with the triumph of Václav Havel's Velvet Revolution in 1989 and all of its scenes are punctuated with smartly-chosen cuts from rock albums of the 20-year period covered in the play (the song titles and all of the music's credits projected on a scrim between the scenes). Unlike The Coast of Utopia, which celebrated the big name revolutionaries of Russia’s 19th century, this play focuses on average people caught up in the convulsions of their time, people like you and me.

After the show, Bill and I walked to Thalia, which I think has the best burgers in the city, although their reputation suffers among cool-conscious foodies because the quick-cook TV chef Rachel Ray has endorsed them. We ordered the burgers, which come with gruyere cheese, great spicy fries and a lovely little salad, along with glasses of the restaurant's “Big House” red wine to wash them down. And we marveled at how much we had enjoyed Rock 'n' Roll. I said I wanted to see it again. But, of course, there's a big part of me that wants to relive the '60s again too.