Pear’s ‘Piano Teacher’ hits some dissonant notes

“The Piano Teacher,” Pear Theatre’s existing output, has very little to do with the 1991 movie of the very same identify. Alternatively, Julia Cho’s engage in starts off with an just about hourlong monologue by longtime piano teacher Mrs. K (Ann Hopkins), who life by itself given that the demise of her partner and is sensation the twin outcomes of isolation and loneliness.

Just one day she opens up her piano bench and finds one of the publications she stuffed out with the names and details about just about every of her a lot of piano students. On a whim, she picks a name at random (Mary Fields) and phone calls her. Mary, performed by Francheska Loy, is as stunned to listen to Mrs. K’s voice as Mrs. K is to listen to hers.

Mrs. K is so content just after speaking with Mary that she decides to simply call a variety of her other former students.

“Of course, I bought a good deal of improper figures and dangle-ups,” she states, “but I also talked to the mother and father of some of my old learners. I hoped that a couple of my learners experienced ongoing their musical studies. It would be so enjoyable to assume I experienced taught a boy or girl prodigy!”

Director Reed Flores makes use of silhouettes and again lighting to great influence, so that the back wall of Mrs. K’s residing space, covered in wallpaper, instantly gets a white screen guiding which Mary Area, her partner and youngsters can be found when she’s on the telephone with Mrs. K. The Pear’s creative director Sinjin Jones is credited with making the projection structure, which adds dimension to an otherwise static engage in.

At periods Cho’s 2007 engage in feels as if it expects a ton from the audience, intuiting what happened in Mrs. K’s husband’s early existence, when he was subjected to brutality and violence. She tells the viewers that he was, in essence, a political refugee when he arrived to the United States. But she has repressed a lot of recollections about him that her former pupils remind her about.