One might define music as sound that communicates emotion without language—sound, in fact, that defies and challenges language, expressing ideas that are simply not encompassed in linguistic possibility. How difficult, then, it must be to write a play about the experience of performing music; to express in words something that by definition transcends and evades words. Michael Hollinger, a playwright who started out as a musician and studied viola at Oberlin Conservatory, has set himself this challenge and risen to it with lots of flair, possibly because his intimate knowledge of both dramatic and musical forms has made him specially aware of the connections between the two.

Writing of his love affair with chamber music, especially the string quartet, Hollinger remembers that “I loved the intimacy of the [string quartet] form, the range and profundity of the repertoire, the way a melody becomes a supporting line as another player comes to the fore—not the movement of armies, but rather the subtle interplay of voices, like characters in a play.” The music itself, in the most fundamental way, is drama, but so of course is the personal dynamic of the quartet, which Hollinger characterizes as a dysfunctional marriage with four people and no sex. The idea for the play came to him in 2003, when he jotted on a scrap of paper: “four characters—a string quartet. We follow this quartet through their rehearsals (& performance?). The music mirrors their personal engagements, relationships, entanglements, perhaps breakdowns.”

Opus, the play