An odd factor occurs to time throughout Stereophonic, playwright David Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin’s sensational play on the John Golden Theatre in New York. The present’s three hours and 10 minutes collapse a full yr, from June 1976 to June 1977, {that a} band—made up of vocalist Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), lead guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka), keys participant Holly (Juliana Canfield), bassist Reg (Will Brill), and drummer Simon (Chris Stack)—spends recording their new album, with engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) manning the board. And, to be clear, these three hours and 10 minutes don’t fly by. This can be a play that revels in silences—whether or not tense, shocked, or unhappy—as a lot because it does in rollicking sound. (Will Butler of Arcade Hearth composed the songs, which the actors play on actual devices.) The meticulously rendered recording-studio set, by David Zinn, additionally by no means modifications, so that you’d be forgiven for having little sense of how a lot time has handed by the top of Act I (a month), or for lacking that in Act IV, they’re now not in Sausalito, however Los Angeles.
But the motion, akin to it’s—rooted within the generally fraught, regularly tedious, often revelatory course of of creating artwork—casts a heady spell. Stereophonic loved a sold-out run off-Broadway final fall, at Playwrights Horizons, earlier than transferring to Broadway this April, the place it’s acquired nonetheless extra acclaim (and 4 Drama League Award nominations). And each Sarah Pidgeon, 27, and Juliana Canfield, 32, invoke sweeping, unknowable forces (“the universe”; “quite a lot of mysticism”) when requested to explain what first attracted them to the piece.
Earlier than Pidgeon—greatest recognized till now for her roles in Prime Video’s The Wilds and Hulu’s Tiny Stunning Issues—auditioned for the present final Could, she’d learn for it in March 2020. (The pandemic scuttled plans for a spring 2021 manufacturing.) These intervening years would show important to her interpretation of the looking out, barely neurotic Diana; emotional notes that she may solely approximate at 23 had new resonance in her later 20s. “There have been issues that she was speaking about that I may see in my very own life extra clearly,” Pidgeon displays one Tuesday morning throughout previews. Not solely did the fracturing love story between Diana and Peter—who speak, after which struggle, about ambition {and professional} pressures and having kids—appear loads much less summary to her than it used to, however Pidgeon’s perspective on her personal profession as an artist had additionally advanced in vital methods. Diana, who reckons extra explicitly along with her picture as a rockstar than anybody else within the band, “doesn’t essentially perceive her company and the facility that she has [as a songwriter], as a result of she depends a lot on her boyfriend to assist her make it occur,” Pidgeon explains. As an actor, she may acknowledged that self-consciousness. “There’s a lot rejection on this business,” she says. “I feel it could open up numerous self-doubt and second-guessing, this sense you could’t do that job except a number of individuals say that they need to rent you and provide the alternative.”
