From the battlefield to the minds of composers

Peter Greenaway -- the film director, visual artist and sometime opera librettist -- has a conspiracy theory about 10 deaths that have occurred since the end of World War II. At the time of his death, each individual was wearing a hat. Each was smoking. It was dark. Each left a grieving widow. Each was a composer.

Some were shot. The first was Anton Webern, accidentally killed by an occupying American soldier in 1945 when the Austrian composer stepped outside after dinner and lighted a cigar. Another was John Lennon. A couple were fictional, like the Paraguayan composer Greenaway used as the subject of his libretto to an astonishing modern Dutch opera -- Louis Andriessen’s “Rosa.”

Webern is also one of the three composers who are the subject of Bryan Davidson’s “War Music.” In the case of this play, which opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, all were real composers -- Frank Bridge and Olivier Messiaen are the other two.

There is nothing here as fanciful or hip as Greenaway’s loopy conspiracy to intertwine them, despite the best efforts of an absurd “Angels in America”-like saint, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Still, the larger picture is valid. Each composer was profoundly affected by war, and that in one way or another rippled through 20th century music.

Neither music history nor music, however, is the subject of this wildly inconsistent three-part play, which at worst is cornball hooey but at best is a meaningful and superbly acted antiwar drama. Davidson thrives on the personal level, inventing instances in which great men touch small lives and war turns everything around. The composers are, like the rest of us, helpless pawns in the unstoppable war machine. But there being indomitable spirits and all that -- here’s where it gets hokey -- you can’t stop music.

The three acts are called movements and, like rudimentary musical structures, are constructed around the juxtaposition and development of various themes. A composer looms over each movement, but it is the musically fluid alternations between vignettes and their development that is interesting (if also a bit clueless, given that this 19th century idea is something the more radical of these composers, and especially Webern, overthrew). The actors all assume several roles and are convincing.

In the first act, Bridge (Victor Raider-Wexler) -- who is these days best remembered as Benjamin Britten’s mentor (both in music and in the practice of pacifism) -- harrumphs about the idiocy of war, while that idiocy is portrayed in a British military hospital on the front in France in 1918. There, a corporal (Jeremy Maxwell), a young pianist close to Bridge, is recovering from the amputation of his right arm and coping with war’s incongruities. Pretty Nurse Poole (Nancy Bell) supplies silly sex. Bridge writes his protege a score for the left hand alone.

Webern comes next. The composer, whose profound miniatures explored the deepest mathematical and spiritual implications of Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, was a strange case. The Nazis labeled his music degenerate for its severe modernist abstraction. Still, with head-in-the-clouds idealism for the high ideals of German art, Webern espoused the Nazi cause. He spent the war years isolated. His accidental murder was a shot heard around the musical world, and Webern became the patron saint of the postwar avant-garde.

The Webern act, introduced by the composer (Christopher Shaw) cleverly describing 12-tone music, follows the shattered life of the American (John Prosky) soldier who shot him and, less interestingly, of a young acolyte (Jeremy Maxwell), the son of a sacristan (Raider-Wexler), in whose church the Lady of Seven Sorrows (Bell) stands and winks.

Finally, we encounter Messiaen, a French composer in a German prisoner of war camp in 1941, where he wrote his “Quartet for the End of Time,” the work that made him famous. At times, “War Music” can seem like the work of two divergent sensibilities, and no more so than here. In a wonderfully humorous and tender rehearsal, three bedraggled fellow prisoners, a clarinetist (Prosky), violinist (Shaw) and cellist (Kevin Crowley), await Messiaen (Maxwell), who is to bring them the final movement for his quartet. The cellist tells clarinet jokes (What is the most beautiful sound a clarinet can make? Splash!). Nerves are on end.

Meanwhile, Messiaen is on a spiritual dream journey in quest for the time-bending finale for his end-of-time composition. He is led by -- you guessed it -- Ms. Seven Sorrows. In his dream, he stumbles upon Bridge and Webern (who actually would become an inspiration a few years hence) and goes out in search of birdsong with his first wife, Claire Delbos (Tina Holmes).

This farcical finale has the feel of desperation, of finding ways to tie things together that need no tying, of a playwright’s failure to trust his audience. And it is a bookend to a vapid prelude, in which the three composers step up to three ornate music stands, tap their batons and freeze, all to the background sound of an orchestra tuning up.

And that is the odd thing about both this play and its direction by Jessica Kubzansky. She is expert in traditional interactions between characters but turns trite when she tries to make something out of the supernatural or grasps at big themes. Susan Gratch’s minimal set remind us of the show’s modest roots -- it was originally produced in 2002 by Echo Theater Company and Playwrights’ Arena. Traditional props work just fine, and the fluidity of scene change impresses. But then there is the tacky proscenium, engraved with musical scores overlaying the battlefield maps. Elizabeth Palmer, who designed the costumes, doesn’t like belts on composers.

Oh, and the music. I think this would be a better play without the recorded tidbits. Some of them are misleading (Webern’s early Five Pieces for String Quartet isn’t 12-tone), none are evocatively used. Why not let a music-less play about composers stimulate curiosity, and then sell CDs in the lobby?

*

‘War Music’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 22

Price: $28-$46

Contact: (310) 208-5454

Running Time: 2 hours,

25 minutes

Nancy Bell ...Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Nurse Poole, Helen Bell

Victor Raider-Wexler...Frank Bridge, Sacristan, German Soldier #2

Christopher Shaw...Anton Webern, Dr. Ely, Heinrich, Jean Le Boulaire, German Soldier #1

Jeremy Maxwell...Olivier Messiaen, Lance Corporal Douglas Fox, Dieter

Kevin Crowley...Private Barkley, Helmut, Sgt. Murray, Etienne Pasquier, Corporal Gurney

Tina Holmes...A Mother, Elizabeth Bell, Christine Mattel, Claire Delbos

John Prosky...Mr. Denby, PFC Raymond Bell, Henri Akoka

By Bryan Davidson. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Set by Susan Gratch. Lighting by Michael Gilliam. Costumes by Elizabeth Palmer. Sound by John Zalewski. Stage manager: Lisa J. Snodgrass.