Keys to the role, all 88 of them

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This article was published 29/02/2024 (941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To prepare for her key role as a struggling concert pianist in The Piano Teacher, Gwendolyn Collins first needed to become a piano student. Again.

The Winnipeg-born actor and theatre artist took lessons growing up, but couldn’t stomach the regimen of daily practice, which took precious time away from her classes at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People (MTYP).

So when she was cast in Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s production of Dorothy Dittrich’s Governor General’s Award-winning play — which opens at the Tom Hendry Warehouse tonight — Collins required a bit of extra tutelage from assistant director Jodi Kristjanson, who found herself playing the role of a piano teacher from the comfort of her own living room.

Starting mid-December, Collins visited Kristjanson’s home every Tuesday and Thursday for one-on-one lessons, relearning how to identify notation and gaining an understanding of the pieces interspersed throughout Dittrich’s script, including airy selections by Austrian classical composer Joseph Haydn and mid-century jazz numbers by the late Montreal composer and bandleader Oscar Peterson.

For Collins, playing the role of the student offstage mirrored the experience of her character, Erin, a usually excellent pianist who loses her command of the instrument in the wake of a devastating loss.

With real stakes on the line, this experience differed from Collins’ first brush with an etude: she had no choice but to commit to her craft.

“I was strict with myself and practised every day,” she says, using her partner’s dusty keyboard, stowed for years under the slats of their bed frame. “A half-hour became an hour, which became an hour-and-a-half.”

It helped that Kristjanson and Collins already shared an educational bond, only in reverse order: Collins taught Kristjanson during her time as an educator at MTYP and didn’t want to let her former student down. Through a combination of rote memorization and a functional level of visual recognition of notation, Collins was able to embody the music well.

By the time Collins and Jane Testar, who plays Erin’s teacher, Elaine, began rehearsals for director Simon Miron, Collins’ skill set had advanced enough that she was able to hold her own with Testar during duets.

“She’s much better than I am,” says Collins, who says she aspires to be able to sit down at a Christmas party and start group singalongs. “I would love to be that person.”

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Ever since she was about six years old, that person has been Dorothy Dittrich, who started playing a rough upright piano at her grandmother’s house in Burnaby, B.C. “In those days, pianos were part of the everyday furniture,” says Dittrich, 63. “It had a lovely tone.”

Dittrich studied piano quite intensely, first learning from a neighbourhood teacher named Doreen Sciora — “She took care of what were called ‘the babies’ — before being passed on to Donna Fishwick, a serious instructor who had, as Dittrich points out, “a great British name.”

She continued to study piano at the University of British Columbia, where her interest in classical music branched out to the electrifying worlds of jazz music and theatre.

“I loved Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, Brad Mehldau and Keith Jarrett,” she says. Right now, a favourite is the 29-year-old British instrumentalist Jacob Collier.

Her first play, produced in the early 1990s, was a musical called When We Were Singing, a joyful explosion that drew on Dittrich’s experience as a musical director. With The Piano Teacher, Dittrich has created a production of a different tone, a drama/comedy that addresses grief and recovery.

“The situation (of the play) occurred in my mind,” says Dittrich, who writes her dramas in silence. It wasn’t inspired by any particular loss, she says. “I was doing sound design, and one day I woke up in the morning with this thought: What would happen if you were so devastated you couldn’t play anymore?”

Dittrich has felt that blockage, though only for a week or two, when she chooses to avoid the instrument. But for Collins’ Erin, not to play is not an option; it’s her career and livelihood, and in many ways, her self-worth.

Though they aren’t direct representations of real people, Dittrich’s characters are drawn from her own experiences as both a student and as a teacher. For the last six years, she’s become someone else’s Donna Fishwick.

Although it’s teeming with music, Dittrich says The Piano Teacher is not a musical. But the writing, Collins says, is beautiful and gentle, which is exactly how Dittrich describes the opening strings of the show’s first song, a trio sonata by Haydn.

“I think that if there’s rhythm (in the writing), then it’s musical,” the playwright says.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com