It’s Broadway composer Charlie Sussman’s seventy-fifth birthday and his family—his son Jonathan, a Shakespeare scholar at Stanford, Jonathan’s wife, Deirdre, a concert pianist, their sixteen-year old daughter, Miranda, and Janey, Charlie’s disaffected, gay younger daughter—have all come from California to his old house on the Connecticut coast on a late-June weekend to celebrate. The celebration will be presided over by Charlie’s loyal, Yankee second wife, Margery, who is fiercely protective of Charlie’s well being.
Charlie is an irascible, self-involved musical theatre composer whose work was all the rage on Broadway in the seventies. Although he hasn’t had a hit show in over twenty years and his heart is not what it used to be, he’s still plugging away and anxious to play his new score for the family.
Scores of a different kind, however, are on the minds of his children: Jonathan a rigid academic obsessed with his career and with getting Miranda into Yale, is pushing the poor girl to the breaking point while still holding a long-standing grudge against his father and Margery; Jonathan’s highly-strung wife, Deirdre, is fed up with Jonathan’s obsessive pressure and is at the point of walking out; Janey, who has always played second fiddle to Jonathan, has long-harbored issues to settle as well.
But, above all, they each have a score to settle with their father, who left his dying wife twenty years before to marry Margery. Charlie has a secret of his own.
The Sussman Variations is funny, intense, smart, warm, and has echoes throughout of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Most importantly, it’s infused with music—Charlie’s Broadway songs, the Schubert Impromptus that Deirdre is practicing and the eponymous “Sussman Variations,” a classical piece that Charlie has written for the occasion. The play examines, with insight, melody and humor, the complexity of family relationships, the sacrifices one makes at the altar of ambition, and the complex ways we raise our children.