Madly Mozart: The Players presents 'Cosi'

For a clear perspective on society, there’s nothing like an outsider’s point of view.

Australian playwright Louis Nowra knows this full well. His plays are full of outcasts, misfits, rejects and rebels on the outside looking in. 

“Cosi,” the Players Centre for Performing Arts’ latest production, is no exception. It offers a fragmented kaleidoscope of viewpoints from the most celebrated misfits of all: the folks society labels insane and locks away.

The year is 1971. Lewis (Tanner Holman), a college dropout, talks his way into an art therapist position at a shabby asylum. They start rehearsing Mozart’s “Cosí fan tutte” — in English, because nobody speaks Italian. The theater smells like “burnt wood and mold.” The cast — a motley crew of pyromaniacs, obsessive compulsives and a recovering drug addict — surprisingly doesn’t stink.

“They’re from radically different backgrounds,” says director Dan Higgs. “Lewis starts to discover they’re not all that crazy — they just don’t fit in.”

He notes that Lewis doesn’t start out as a good director. “He’s all bluff,” says Higgs. “When someone asks, ‘What’s your concept?’ he replies, ‘I don’t have a concept; I’m a director!’ But Lewis winds up putting himself in the shoes of these wildly diverse individuals. He gets outside of himself, and the experience makes him a better director.”

Lewis learns dramaturgical lessons. The life lessons prove a bit more painful. Mozart’s opera revolved around a bet between two officers that they could trick their fiancées into being unfaithful. “Roughly translated, the title means ‘All women are like that’—which is another way of saying women are like men.”

Basically, the moral is: Don’t lead your lover into temptation. Lewis has enough sense not to place bets on the virtue of his girlfriend Lucy (Anna Massey). She winds up sleeping with Lewis’ best friend Nick (Quoc Pham) — a charismatic anti-war radical — on her own initiative. Lewis finds out the hard way.

As Higgs puts it. “Lewis asks Lucy, ‘You’re not sleeping with Nick, are you?’ Her response is, ‘No. I’m having sex with him and sleeping with you.’ She tells him sex should just be sex — and forget love. Thousands are dying in the Vietnam War. Who can think about love in a time like this? Lewis agrees with her in theory, but in his heart he feels betrayed.”

As auditions lead to rehearsals, Lewis takes his mind off left-wing politics. The good-hearted social worker Justin (Ross Boehringer) is on his side. The inmates aren’t, at first. He butts heads with three women: former addict Julie (Olivia Valek), obsessive Ruth (Jenny Walker) and volatile Cherry (Debbi White). The male patients give him headaches as well, including Henry (Tom Aposporos) the bottled-up, ex-criminal lawyer, firebug Doug (Parker Lawhorne) and the mostly medicated Zac (Joshua Seavey), the musical director. The production is really Roy’s baby.

While Roy (Don Walker) may be crazy, he knows a thing or two about theater. Ultimately, Roy pulls the group and Lewis into his obsession — and the meaning behind it. Mozart’s opera celebrates love between flawed human beings. The composer’s magic starts to work on Lewis. Despite the protests back home and the body count overseas, he decides that love might not be a thing of the past.

Holman says that, “My character grows. He’s very wary at first, and then goes beyond tolerance to affection and appreciation. It’s all about giving a second look to the people we initially write off and really seeing them as human beings.”

The reason for the change?

The encounter-group quality of a good rehearsal. Even outside mental institutions.

“This is really a play about rehearsal,” says Higgs. “Rehearsal demands emotional honesty and self-exposure. The process transforms you, and that’s what ‘Cosi’ is really all about.” He adds that a similar thing has been happening at The Players.

“I’m working with actors from widely different backgrounds, from longtime professionals to high-school kids,” he says. “I know some of the actors very well, like Jenny and Don Walker and Tom Aposporos. Others are completely new to me, and we’re still getting to know each other. The whole process has been fascinating. Our experience really echoes the play — apart from the fact that we’re all certifiably sane.”

Higgs adds that rehearsal is going smoothly, and all of the actors are now “off-book.”

“I give most of the credit to the playwright,” says the director. “Nowra’s characters talk like real human beings. Good dialogue flows off your tongue. Actors pick it up quickly, because it’s the kind of thing they’d naturally say. Bad dialogue is terribly difficult to remember. Your mind rebels; your tongue rebels. But we’ve all picked it up very quickly. That tells me the playwright’s doing something right.”