Pear’s ‘Piano Teacher’ hits some dissonant notes

“The Piano Teacher,” Pear Theatre’s current production, has nothing to do with the 1991 movie of the same name. Instead, Julia Cho’s play starts with an almost hourlong monologue by longtime piano teacher Mrs. K (Ann Hopkins), who lives alone since the death of her husband and is feeling the twin effects of isolation and loneliness.

One day she opens up her piano bench and finds one of the books she filled out with the names and information about each of her many piano students. On a whim, she picks a name at random (Mary Fields) and calls her. Mary, played by Francheska Loy, is as surprised to hear Mrs. K’s voice as Mrs. K is to hear hers.

Mrs. K is so happy after talking with Mary that she decides to call a number of her other former students.

“Of course, I got a lot of wrong numbers and hang-ups,” she says, “but I also talked to the parents of some of my old students. I hoped that a few of my students had continued their musical studies. It would be so exciting to think I had taught a child prodigy!”

Director Reed Flores uses silhouettes and back lighting to great effect, so that the back wall of Mrs. K’s living room, covered in wallpaper, instantly becomes a white screen behind which Mary Field, her husband and children can be seen when she’s on the phone with Mrs. K. The Pear’s artistic director Sinjin Jones is credited with creating the projection design, which adds dimension to an otherwise static play.

At times Cho’s 2007 play feels as if it expects a lot from the audience, intuiting what happened in Mrs. K’s husband’s early life, when he was subjected to brutality and violence. She tells the audience that he was, in essence, a political refugee when he came to the United States. But she has repressed a lot of memories about him that her former students remind her about.