Play brings Jane Fonda back to Broadway

NEW YORK (AP) — Talk about ambitious.

Moises Kaufman’s earnest, plot-heavy 33 Variations swirls with big ideas about big subjects — life, death, art to name three — and how they intersect and illuminate each other.

Yet the play often seems dramatically tepid and slow moving. And this despite the efforts of a hardworking cast that includes Jane Fonda, returning to the New York after an absence of more than four decades.

Fonda is fine as Katherine, a university musicologist dying of amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. But not before she hopes to solve a musical mystery involving Beethoven and his obsession with a musical trifle written by his publisher, Anton Diabelli. The master composer wrote 33 piano variations on the publisher’s inferior bit of music, his longest piece for solo piano.

But that’s only part of the story. The drama, which opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, spurts off in other directions, too: The prickly relationship between Katherine and her career-challenged daughter Clara, played by Samantha Mathis, and the budding romance between Clara and a remarkably even-tempered male nurse (Colin Hanks), who has been helping treat mom.

One of the problems with  33 Variations is Fonda’s cipherlike character. She may be center stage much of the time, but we don’t really learn much about her. Our emotional investment is limited as the woman’s health slowly declines during her determined search for answers to Beethoven’s obsession.