Blending the lines between play and musical, the Guthrie’s latest production “Old Wicked Songs” may get you to turn off the TV and check out a real theatrical production. There is no other play in the Twin Cities where music speaks as much as the actors do. The cast is comprised of two top-notch actors and a stage, reminding the audience of the importance of music among politics and current events.

“It’s a beautiful, funny and poignant play,” Peter Rothstein, director of “Old Wicked Songs” said. “Though this is not a musical, music is a central character in the play.”

“Old Wicked Songs” written by playwright John Marans, received a Pulitzer Prize in Drama nomination in 1996. Set in Vienna, Austria in 1986, the play focuses on Stephen Hoffman and Professor Josef Mashkan, a musical student and his professor. Hoffman is an arrogant musical prodigy seeking to rid himself of an artistic block, and Mashkan is his clever and passionate professor who cannot learn to accept his past. While Hoffman has mastered the technical aspects of music, Mashkan chides him for the lack of spirit he perceives in Hoffman’s playing. Each man tests the other’s beliefs throughout the play while coming to grips with their own struggles. Accentuating these spiritual lessons is Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” song cycle.

The play explores a number of political and spiritual subjects, possibly explaining why it is so renowned. The tumultuous political backdrop in Vienna provides daunting questions to both Hoffman and Mashkan. In Spring of 1986, Kurt Waldheim was elected federal president of Austria, seemingly overcoming a potential political catastrophe. Waldheim was accused of being a Nazi war criminal during World War II, and as such his candidacy was opposed by the World Jewish Council. In such a strange political climate it is little wonder Hoffman, a Jew, reflects upon the Holocaust and his own faith while enduring Mashkan’s anti-Semitic taunts. Mashkan, for his part, must learn to cope with his own past.

“I believe all art is political,” Rothstein said when asked why he chose to put on such a play during a political election. “This play looks specifically at the intersection of art and politics. Unfortunately,the arts have been completely neglected in our current political campaign rhetoric.”

“Dichterliebe” itself rounds out the cast, as the music helps salve both Hoffman’s and Mashkan’s spirits. Composed by Schumann in the 1840s, the song cycle is based off of Schumann’s tumultuous experiences with his lover and fellow musician Clara Wieck, who refused to marry him. Out of passion, Schumann supposedly created the “Dichterliebe,” or “Poet’s Love” as it is commonly translated, in nine days. He used the poems in Heinrich Heine’s epic volume “Lyric Intermezzo,” a collection of sixty-six poems telling the story of a man whose heart was broken by his love.

In the poems, the man rages his way through pain, longing, doubt, misery and all the emotions of heartache until he longs for death. Schumann originally set his works to twenty poems before refining the song cycle to sixteen. The title of the play is taken from the first line of the last poem Schumann used. It must have worked for Schumann, as he eventually was married to Wieck. It works for the characters in “Old Wicked Songs” as well, for both characters learn to grow through Schumann’s musical journey, taking the audience into an experience that has the seriousness of a drama yet the score of a musical. For the first time in the play’s history, theGuthrie will feature operaticperformances of “Dichterliebe” in repertory with the play. That has never been done before, according to Rothstein. Rothstein, who is the director of Theater Latte Da, is no stranger to music, nor was he daunted
by the unusual approach to a theatrical work like this.

“If there is one thing consistent about my work it’s the importance of music,” Rothstein said. “I have a degree in music as well as theater. So for me that’s not a challenge, but quite the opposite. For me, music encourages a theatrical liberation.”

“Old Wicked Songs” opens Sept. 13 at the Joe Dowling Studio in the Guthrie Theater. It is performed by Jonas Goslow, who plays Hoffman, and Raye Birk, who plays Mashkan. Both actors are well known in the Twin Cities theatrical scene, as Goslow recently played Demetrius in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Birk has reprised his impressive performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in the Guthrie’s “A Christmas Carol” for several years. Rothstein had never worked with either actor before but had admired their work for a long time.

“They are two great actors in their own right, but together they are extraordinary,” Rothstein said.

Politics, passion, conflict and a haunting love score. If you want to experience something more than your average theater experience, be sure to waltz into the Guthrie before the show and the accompanying concerts end Oct. 5.