With Strings Attached:
Violist-turned-playwright Michael Hollinger draws on personal inspiration for Opus
By Joanna Horowitz |
Michael Hollinger |
When something’s not working in a script, Michael Hollinger turns into a musician.
“You don’t judge yourself too harshly,” says Hollinger. “You just say, ‘That’s a little
flat. Oh, that’s a little flat again. That was right.’”
All of violist-turned-playwright Hollinger’s 17 plays benefit from his strong music
background, but Opus places music—and Hollinger’s own experiences—at the very center.
“[My] other plays have more mask on top of them. They take place in periods other
than this one. They take place in the Middle Ages in France or in 1960s Paris, places I
wasn’t,” Hollinger says in a phone interview from his home outside Philadelphia. “This
one definitely has the closest relationship to me. I mean, it’s about guys in their mid
40's in the Northeast in an urban setting who make art for a living.”
Opus, which first premiered in 2006, follows the volatile relationship intricacies of
the fictional Lazara String Quartet as they prepare for the gig of a lifetime. Hollinger
grew up playing viola in string quartets, and even majored in viola performance at Oberlin
Conservatory. But, while the characters in the play channel their passions and drive into
their quartet’s music, Hollinger found practice “boring and physically taxing.”
Hollinger chose to stop playing the viola and look elsewhere in the arts for inspiration.
Soon he rekindled a love for theatre that started as a child doing community theatre with his
parents. He attended graduate school for theatre and worked as a literary manager and
dramaturg before becoming a theatre professor at Villanova University.
It took 18 years for Hollinger to pick up an instrument again. “A neighbor of mine who
discovered I was a closet violist encouraged me to join up with this chamber music program
that took place twice a month,” remembers Hollinger. “It just really reawakened my great love
of string quartets. And it reminded me that many years earlier I had thought, ‘Wouldn’t it
be cool if there was a play about string quartets and the interaction of the characters was
like the interaction of instruments?’”
With a keen sense of rhythm and tempo, Opus plays like its own piece of music. The
characters’ voices come together in a variety of ways, from four-part monologues to overlapping
dialogue. At times, the characters even take on the personalities of their instruments.
“Carl is referred to as ‘terra firma’ by Dorian,” says Hollinger. “He’s speaking musically in
terms of the lower voice coming in and anchoring things, but he’s generally seen as an anchor.
You might say that Elliot has an occasional diva-like quality that might be associated with the
high melodic part of the violin, and then Alan has maybe some self-esteem issues related to being
a violinist.”
But more than musical metaphors, the heart of the play—and the reason that Hollinger chose a
quartet as his subject—is the inherent intimacy. While Hollinger has also been an actor and a
rock musician and certainly knows what it’s like to work in a high-pressure group dynamic, he
feels that ironically the string quartet’s wordlessness makes it the most compelling subject for
a play.
“In music, there’s no layer of character on top of it,” says Hollinger. “It’s pure, there’s no
language there, so what passes between and among the players can feel extraordinarily naked, and
it’s a wonderful and really intimate feeling when a quartet is working that way together. It also
makes for vulnerability, and people, they’re exposed, so they can get reactive, too.”
