“The Piano Instructor,” Pear Theatre’s present manufacturing, has nothing to do with the 1991 film of the identical identify. As a substitute, Julia Cho’s play begins with an virtually hourlong monologue by longtime piano instructor Mrs. Okay (Ann Hopkins), who lives alone for the reason that dying of her husband and is feeling the dual results of isolation and loneliness.
In the future she opens up her piano bench and finds one of many books she stuffed out with the names and details about every of her many piano college students. On a whim, she picks a reputation at random (Mary Fields) and calls her. Mary, performed by Francheska Loy, is as stunned to listen to Mrs. Okay’s voice as Mrs. Okay is to listen to hers.
Mrs. Okay is so comfortable after speaking with Mary that she decides to name various her different former college students.
“After all, I received loads of fallacious numbers and hang-ups,” she says, “however I additionally talked to the dad and mom of a few of my previous college students. I hoped that a couple of of my college students had continued their musical research. It might be so thrilling to assume I had taught a baby prodigy!”
Director Reed Flores makes use of silhouettes and again lighting to nice impact, in order that the again wall of Mrs. Okay’s lounge, coated in wallpaper, immediately turns into a white display screen behind which Mary Discipline, her husband and youngsters might be seen when she’s on the telephone with Mrs. Okay. The Pear’s creative director Sinjin Jones is credited with creating the projection design, which provides dimension to an in any other case static play.
At occasions Cho’s 2007 play feels as if it expects lots from the viewers, intuiting what occurred in Mrs. Okay’s husband’s adolescence, when he was subjected to brutality and violence. She tells the viewers that he was, in essence, a political refugee when he got here to the USA. However she has repressed loads of recollections about him that her former college students remind her about.
Hopkins as Mrs. Okay is fittingly meek, maybe somewhat addled however at all times gracious (besides as soon as when she unexpectedly yells out an expletive after answering a telephone name however listening to nobody on the opposite finish).
On opening night time final Friday, the viewers was left at the hours of darkness when Hopkins immediately walked offstage 3 times for a couple of seconds every time, then returned to proceed her soliloquy. Why she did so is left to the viewers’s creativeness.
“The Piano Instructor” runs for 100 minutes with out an intermission. It performs in repertoire with “Three Tall Ladies” by way of July 17. The play will not be really helpful for younger audiences as a consequence of suggestive language and overt discussions of sexual violence. Tickets are $35-$38 at www.thepear.org or 650- 254-1148.
Proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required, and masks should be worn contained in the theater.