Courtesy photo Denis Butkus, left, and Kenneth Tigar are featured in the Ensemble Theatre Company's production of Jon Marans' "Old Wicked Songs."

The transformational power of music is the engine that hums through Jon Marans' "Old Wicked Songs," which is being staged through June 22 by Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara.

A Pulitzer Prize contender in 1996, the play brings together a young American piano prodigy whose passion has dried up along with his career and a retread Austrian music teacher who has passion, and ultimately wisdom, to spare. They come together with a jolt when the pianist, Stephen Hoffman, arrives in 1986 Vienna to study with a Professor Schiller but finds himself instead in the eccentric hands of Professor Josef Mashkan. It seems that Schiller has decreed that the American first study voice with Mashkan for three months; only then will he agree to take him on as a piano pupil. The young man, clearly on fast-forward, finds the situation untenable. Protesting, he suffers Mashkan as the only route to Schiller.

Mashkan immediately diagnoses a central lack of passion in Hoffman, partly the result of a life that has dealt him little joy and even less sadness, a surface life with few undercurrents. The path to his survival as prescribed by Mashkan is through Robert Schumann's song cycle, "Dichterliebe" ("A Poet's Love"), based on the writings of German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine. They begin with the first of the cycle, where Maytime signals fresh love and life bursting into bloom. When the relationship between teacher and student hits a serious impediment, a song churns emotions as Hoffman spits out "I bear no grudge though my heart will break," alienation having set in. At the end of the tumultuous birth, death and rebirth of their connection, they look at the cycle finale, "Old wicked songs ... let us now bury them."

Demands on the two actors who carry this play are extraordinary. In addition to the volatile dynamic between the men, each is required to do a fair measure of serious lieder singing, as well as play — or appear to play — the piano with classically trained skill. Kenneth Tigar as Mashkan and Denis Butkus as Hoffman accomplish this with almost miraculous facility. Even when you consider that any actor must learn how to use his voice, both sing with more than a reasonable amount of credibility, Tigar with the vigor of an aging teacher, Butkus with the freshness of one new to the art, bolstered by a refined musicality that his character could have gleaned from his piano studies. As for the frequent spurts of piano playing, the men manage to make it look as if they attack the keyboard spontaneously and play skillfully, although the "art" of it all is accomplished through split-second timing and technical support. Director Jonathan Fox, Ensemble Theatre's executive artistic director, has found an impeccable duo for the occasion.

Add to all of those talents the ability to speak a fair amount of German early in the play, and to make its meaning reasonably comprehensible even to the uninitiated, and Tigar and Butkus are truly exceptional. Tigar, with character written all over his face, and Butkus, with an unlined visage shielding so much dramatic potential, are worthy of, and received, a sustained standing ovation at the conclusion of Saturday's opening night.

Mashkan and Hoffman's clashes are not just about music, but about life and how to live it. Both are hiding secrets when they meet, and when the secrets are revealed, they mark sea changes that reflect on Vienna and its history and the impact it has made on each of them, Mashkan in the past and Hoffman in the present.

Marans comes to his understanding of human nature and art through two paths of study, the clarity of mathematics and the emotional capacity of music, his undergraduate majors. They allow him a broad and responsive palette for his perceptive tale.

— E-mail Rita Moran at| ritamoran@earthlink.net.