'Dissonance' attempts to play on the heartstrings

WILLIAMSTOWN -- It's a tricky thing, metaphor. It can lift us from the simple plane of reality to the loftily supernatural realm of ideas, or it can hang around our necks and drag us down to the depths with its leaden insistence on following every last one of its terms. If it can do all that in one sentence, imagine what it can do over the course of a two-hour play.

Damian Lanigan's "Dissonance" is such an extended metaphor, an ingeniously constructed study of the complex relationships among the members of a string quartet and their disruption by a visiting rock star. And, in its beautifully designed and expertly staged premiere on the Williamstown Theatre Festival's Nikos Stage, it reaches both the heights and the depths.

In the play's strongest moments, it draws emotional richness and intellectual stimulation from the interplay of music and the lives of its players. At other times, though, its mapping of music to life can feel excessively schematic -- like more of an academic exercise than an organic creation.

This is especially true in what we might call the opening movement, where Lanigan sets out his themes. We begin, as we gaze at the empty chairs and open instrument cases of a waiting rehearsal hall, by listening to the tensely clashing first passage of Mozart's C Major Quartet (K. 465), often called the "Dissonance Quartet" because of this very opening.

The lights dim. When they rise again, the four members of the quartet are now seated in their places, their bows frozen on the last notes we hear (an effective solution, which recurs throughout the play, to the problem of having nonmusicians portray musicians believably).

"Too quick," declares James, the first violin.

"You mean too slow, right?" retorts second violin Hal, and they're off. We see quickly -- alas, more quickly than Lanigan credits us for -- that they're arguing about more than tempi, that the dissonance of the music is reflected in the tensions, both intellectual and emotional, among the members of the famed (and fictional) Bradley Quartet.

Leader/founder/eponym James Bradley is acerbic, imperious, British; Hal is younger, brasher, American. Cellist Beth is American, too, but less bluntly oppositional; on viola, Paul is the quieter sort of Brit, ever the brunt of James's dumb-violist jokes.

As the play goes on, the history of their relationships unfolds, sometimes in ways we expect and sometimes, more pleasingly, in ways we don't. It's obvious, for example, that there's some sexual tension between Beth and Hal, but other sources of friction are more surprising and therefore more satisfying.

It's the Beth/Hal relationship that's most clearly upset by the introduction of Jonny, a rock star who engages Beth to teach him, like, everything about classical music. That gives Lanigan a chance to probe the tensions between pop and high culture, commerce and art, but unfortunately it's in these arguments that "Dissonance" threatens to drown its characters in their author's ideas.

When he focuses on their relationships, Lanigan is on firmer ground, and the Williamstown cast responds with verve. Patch Darragh gives Jonny the heat he needs to attract Alicia Witt's delicate but steely Beth; their scenes together carry a genuine electric charge. Their growing attraction gives Thomas Sadoski's Hal something to play off, too, so that his initially annoying mix of arrogance and whininess becomes more touching and layered.

James, too, grows more interesting as Daniel Gerroll slowly reveals the nuances of loss and longing under his biting wit. If that combination borders on stereotype, Gerroll still makes it real. In the less showy role of Paul, Rufus Collins is truly moving -- steadfast, overshadowed, and quietly strong.

Lanigan, a novelist who has also written for radio and TV, clearly knows how to construct a script. But "Dissonance" would be a stronger composition about music, paradoxically, if it were less consciously modeled on a musical composition. It's when Lanigan stops underscoring its resemblance to a score that it becomes what it needs to be: a play, in which characters live and breathe as if on their own, unaware of the composer who calls their tune.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.