Fonda haunting in return to stage

New York —- Some believe obsession leads to madness. But in Moises Kaufman’s new Broadway play “33 Variations,” a formidable music scholar uses her obsession with Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” as an instruction manual for finding a deeper kind of peace.

Dr. Katherine Brandt —- the steely, impenetrable woman at the center of “33 Variations” —- has to crack wide open before grace rushes in. In a genius bit of casting, playwright-director Kaufman chooses the legendary Jane Fonda to occupy the crucible seat of this complicated mother and musicologist.

At 71, Fonda makes her first Broadway appearance in almost 46 years —- exhibiting the serene inner beauty of a woman who seems to have spent several lifetimes fighting back the demons of tragedy, fame and controversy. (The actress moved to Atlanta in the early 1990s, when she married media mogul Ted Turner, and has continued to live in the city since their divorce in 2001.) Happily, hers is a bravura performance: technically polished, emotionally engaging, honest to the core.

In Kaufman’s fastidiously structured play, which features piano music by Diane Walsh, Katherine journeys to Bonn to study Beethoven’s manuscripts. Ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease and troubled by her relationship with her only child, the academic sleuth wants to solve the riddle of “Diabelli’s Variations.” Why did Beethoven spend years writing 33 variations in response to a commission for one?

In this hallucinatory interlacing of past and present, we see daughter Clara (Samantha Mathis) fall for Katherine’s male nurse (played by Colin Hanks), and Katherine encountering Beethoven himself, who is succumbing to deafness and dashing off his Mass in his spare time. (Zach Grenier gives a dazzling turn as the drooling, tormented genius.)

Both Katherine and Beethoven wrestle with matters of death, time and the creative process. Kaufman wisely leaves the answers to these profound questions unresolved, letting audiences decide with their hearts. At its best, “33 Variations” recalls Margaret Edson’s “Wit” (about a poetry scholar dying of cancer), Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” and the work of Tony Kushner. But the play sags in the middle and ultimately feels a few variations too long.

On the design side, Derek McLane’s sets —- evoking the pages of Beethoven’s notebooks and the towering stacks of a labyrinthine library —- add visual magic to this extended musical conceit. David Lander provides sumptuous lighting, and Janice Pytel’s costumes are appropriate to both the early 1800s and the present.

When Katherine goes in for an X-ray, a strobe light captures Fonda’s elegant visage —- like a deer freezing in the glare of the paparazzi, or a series of bleached out Andy Warhol monochromes. Once again, this fascinating public figure finds herself under the scrutiny of the media and the hot, unforgiving lights of the theater. Fonda transcends the glare —- with a performance that’s as haunting as it is historic.

THEATER REVIEW

“33 Variations”

Grade: B

Through May 27. $67-$117. Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 230 West 49th St., New York. 212-239-6200, telecharge.com.