Bach at Leipzig

Bach at Leipzig
ACT Theatre; ends Sun., May 29

Twenty-seven-year-old playwright Itamar Moses' brainy comedy doesn't settle for cheap laughs, though it has a lot of them. He's got more—much more—on his mind, and you'd better resign yourself to his occasionally exhausting ambitions or forgo the experience altogether. Stick around, though, and . . . well, you'll find out—and you may find Moses' name ingrained in your memory.

It's Germany in 1722 and the vultures descend on the cultural mecca of Leipzig after the city's pre-eminent organist and musical director, Johann Kuhnau, sends out word of his impending death, then promptly keels forward onto his keys. Six musicians—plus world-renowned baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann (Todd J. Bjurstrom), silent between his imperious entrances and exits—show up to stake claim on what is "the most coveted position in German music." They don't make it easy for one another. Between rounds of preening one-upmanship, the composers dish out various righteous religious and aesthetic doctrines that, each insists, will crown him the winner of this contest—though none of them is beyond a little guilt, blackmail, and/or intimidation if it eliminates the competition.

Our players are a disparate, desperate bunch: radical Johann Friedrich Fasch (Laurence Ballard), who—in one of Moses' many great, big, gorgeous speeches—claims that it should be "the godliness in [music] that matters," and not the literal use of the word "God"; Georg Balthasar Schott (David Pichette), a stringent traditionalist who shudders at the thought of progress ("This is not Italy!"); weary Johann Christoph Graupner (John Procaccino), constantly boxing with Telemann's giant shadow; Georg Lenck (Daniel Rappaport), a loser who sees one last chance at glory; feather-brained Georg Freidrich Kaufmann (R. Hamilton Wright); and young upstart Johann Martin Steindorff (Max Gordon Moore). Steindorff casually reminds Lenck that Lenck owes Steindorff's father a great deal of money; Schott casually reminds Steindorff that Steindorff has slept with an ungodly number of married women; playwright Moses reminds us that everyone is named either Johann or Georg; and so on. Bach, who remains unseen throughout, arrives offstage late in the game, his natural genius quietly shaming the pettiness of his contemporaries.

There's a lot here: a look at pride, the meaning and duties of talent, and deep, discursive ruminations on whether music and people can—or should—evolve without spiritual faith. And that's before Moses goes on a terrific tear at the fourth wall and has the pure-of-heart Kaufmann duped into believing that all the duplicitous maneuvering he keeps accidentally witnessing is merely the rehearsal for a play titled The Undeniably Credulous Fool.

Moses' craft has cunning risk and humor—even if it would be considerably riskier to trust that we were smart enough to spot his cunning on our own. The play teasingly explains itself, explains itself again, then explains how clever it was for explaining itself. It reaches the spectacular heights of such self-referential ingenuity at the opening of Act II, when Fasch's monologue about a fugue reveals that the play we're watching is just such a composition, repeating and deconstructing itself even as it moves forward. While Fasch addresses the musical form in a letter to his wife, the other characters swiftly, wordlessly re-enact all the frantic, tangled plot points of Act I right up to the last moment before intermission, until Fasch is left hollering that "structure is only clear in retrospect" and depends "on the attentiveness of the listener."

This mixture of metaphilosophy and farce makes for head games with goose-pimply pleasures when it's working on both counts, though you won't be alone if you start to feel fatigued and wish that Moses would either become the baby Tom Stoppard he's crying out to be or just relax and let loose with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Leipzig. Director Kurt Beattie tries to muscle through the thing by having his cast play it at crowd-pleaser level throughout, as if constant punching at Moses' less delicate, more digressive thoughts on God, Art, and Humanity were the only way to keep the production from turning into Jumpers—the Stoppard play about God, Art, and Humanity with which ACT rather disastrously attempted to wrestle last season.

About half the show is a good time, and the other half is working hard at showing us it's having a good time. Many of the actors' attempts at double takes and false starts and nyuk-nyuk-nyuks are so slowly timed and out of sync that you can practically see the chalk outlines waiting for them before they stiff. And the men aren't entirely sure if they're supposed to be effete or, you know, that way. (Maybe this is too much a matter of personal taste; one man's fancy is, I suppose, another man's fancy.) Rappaport and an appealing but too-green Moore are often tripping over their dense lines or clenching tightly onto them as though they fear they'll get away. The other main four do stellar work individually, but Beattie doesn't get their rhythms working as a team. I think I liked Procaccino the best, because he seems to know how preposterous the period costumes are; he plays the browbeaten Graupner like a guy who's just a little over the whole poofy charade.