Fleetwood cipher Stereophonic at Kauffman Center is a dizzying work of artistic collapse
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
“It’s a torture to need people,” Holly (Emilie Kouatchou) sighs in the fourth act of David Adjmi’s 1970s-set play Stereophonic. It’s not a cynical statement, but a weary one—and this group of people understand her sentiment better than most.
Holly and her bandmates have been recording the follow-up to their number one selling record for an entire year (their last album was finished in three weeks). Over that time, professional and personal relationships have faltered, recovered and imploded. Former spouses and close friends now can’t stand to be in the same room with each other. Small conflicts born of lingering insecurities have exploded into ego-trip-powered shouting matches.
Holly’s point is this: We need people, whether as emotional support, moral guidance or creative collaborators. Human beings are built for community. But the communities we build — even the healthiest, most loving ones — inevitably break our hearts. Sometimes you’re heartbroken, sometimes you’re the heartbreaker, sometimes you’re both. That’s the way it goes.
The national tour of Adjmi’s Tony-winning play, currently on show at the Kauffman Center, is lightly cut down from the original Broadway production to fit it in under three hours (Adjmi lovingly calls it “The Radio Edit”). Fortunately, that trimming doesn’t take away from the immersive atmosphere, which plops audiences into a recording studio in Sausalito, CA, in the mid-70s as an unnamed band that’s not Fleetwood Mac but also not not Fleetwood Mac encounters sudden fame and the fallout that comes with it.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
While the story is its own, Stereophonic’s setting and cast of characters are pretty much a one-to-one parallel for Fleetwood Mac’s recording of Rumours.
Holly, the keyboardist, and her kooky, hard-partying bassist husband Reg (Christopher Mowod) are stand-ins for Christine and John McVie. Talented but insecure singer Diana (Claire DeJean) is our Stevie Nicks. She’s married to Peter (Andrew Gombas in last night’s production), the perfectionist frontman/Lindsey Buckingham approximation.
Weary manager/drummer Simon (Cornelius McMoyer), the play’s version of Mick Fleetwood, is desperately trying to keep everyone working together peaceably. Behind the boards, fledgling engineer Grover (Jack Barrett)—Adjmi’s fictionalized take on Rumours co-producer Ken Caillat—is increasingly certain this record might make his career, if it doesn’t break his brain first.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
Straight plays don’t often get national tours, but Stereophonic is a capital-P production worthy of that treatment, from the ambitious scenic design to the original songs by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, performed live onstage by the actors themselves. The single, impressive set resembles a swanky 70s recording studio: warm wood paneling, poufs, pillows and blankets draped alongside shag carpeted stairs. The recording booth sits on an upper level, behind a wall of glass.
The only flaw in the set design is the wood frames breaking up those window panels. While they’re certainly handsome and period-appropriate, they mess with audience sight lines to a distracting degree. When the whole band performs together, for instance, those window frames might keep you from seeing Holly’s keyboard or bisect your view of Diana, unless you happen to be seated front and center. The design is consistent with the show’s Broadway run and doesn’t ruin the experience, but every time the band enters the booth, it’s hard not to wish set designer David Zinn had gone a different route.
This is also a long play. Adjmi uses much of that length to explore character elements that start subtle, but explode later—the way they might in a creative partnership or a marriage. However, we do also feel that time. When the final act hits, you might feel as tired as the band members themselves. That may or may not be by design, but it does lend a certain air of relief to the final scenes, when necessary, long-avoided conversations finally get addressed.
Stereophonic uses a much-obsessed-over actual event as a springboard to explore creative and romantic relationships, and how our own insecurities, when combined with others’, can contain both the seeds of greatness and of destruction. It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to watch these characters build each other up, then slowly tear each other back down.
Adjmi observes those dynamics so well that you’ll likely be thinking about the play, and all the music that inspired it, for a long time afterward.
