Upright Grand, a new play by Laura Schellhardt

Or: The Song is Ended (but the Melody Lingers On)

A piano is a focal point: of a melody, of a home, or indeed a life. It can be a balustrade of solitude, or the cornerstone of a rambunctious gathering. It can send forth storms or let flow sweet schmaltzy streams of past remembrances. And it is the only instrument designed to be shared.

Pops (Mark Ulrich) is a musician. True, he may be a little temporary challenged, and no compositions bearing his touch wing from others throats or fingers, and his Carnegie hall is the Broken Man’s Bar, but he is a musician, a little more upright than grand. His daughter Kiddo (Charlotte Mae Ellison), a little more grand than upright, is also a musician but one who feels adrift, cut off from her fathers world of melodies and aspirations. In a series of duets over a number of years we see these two spar, spark, lift, and give each other solace as they struggle against the relentless metronome of time.

With the same sharp toothed sentiment Pops and Kiddo so often argue about, Schellhardt joins, neatly as a jeweler, the glittering shorthand of father and daughter (pet phrases, barbed arguments, swallow tailed evasions and double meanings) with the illuminating language of the piano, provided by The Accompanist (Matt Edmonds, who doubles as the productions music director). There are times when the crescendos of conflict erupt with the violence of Hayden’s “Surprises:” unlooked for and jarring (they’re a family “prone to fits.”) But by and large her symphony, and its arpeggios of argument, slots like a simple story should, into the sweet spot of all that we wish we could express.

Director Scott Weinstein blows his actors about like leaves in a courtyard; the set is a cluttered, melancholy bar/stage/den, a general vestibule where moments wait to come to pass. It is undeniably Pops’s world and Ulrich presides over it like Lear at Dover. Despite his tendency to crab at the at the toward his superb patter keeps the play clicking along, offset by quiet moments of askance-eyed eloquence. For her part Ellison matches her father with the same manic voltage, adding a pert and puckish deviousness which she slowly tames, though never loses. She is best set off by Edmonds manifestations of various unlikely mentors (somewhat unfulfilled but always heartfelt, and in the case of the piano amateur Todd, just right).

Cunning and sweet, lacing intricate language around a straightforward story, Upright Grand digs its dagger of schmaltz (and sentiment is a sharp substance indeed) right up to the hilt. It’s a play about loss, and the fear of loss: of chances wasted, precious moments withering on the vine, the right words never found, and the winnowing wind of time that erases all our hopes. Cheerful stuff, indeed, but the script captures them in melody with humor and wit and honesty. It weaves its own melody, and hopefully reminds us all, that there is someone close to us to share it with.