Musician sets mood for Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus'

Georgia Shakespeare's producing artistic director Richard Garner is coaxing his actors — and the composer — through the text, emotions and bloodbath.

Off to the side sits a memorable figure, listening intently and almost imperceptibly moving his body to the rhythms of the actors' speech. His pale, bald head and circular John Lennon glasses and that reddish-gray goatee create an indelible image. He's surrounded by about 50 musical instruments: cymbals, drums, gongs, weird electronic contraptions, flutes from West Africa, Brazil or origins unknown.

His name is Klimchak.

One name. It fits him. Klimchak is the composer for "Titus," and for this production he'll also be in costume and live on stage performing his music.

"In the early stages," says the 54-year-old, self-taught musician, "it's about getting the mood of the scene, fixing a sound palette, then composing [for the performance] off that."

So he experiments as the actors speak. First, he leans into a microphone for "throat" singing — making low, out-of-body amphibian sounds that become a musical motif for Aaron, the Moor (played by Neal A. Ghant) who is one of many "Titus" villains. Then, Klimchak drags a viola bow across a glockenspiel, producing ethereal, spooky tones. Not quite right. So he switches to a six-inch Egyptian flute, making a pastorally spooky sound. Director Garner steps away from his actors for a moment: "That's great," he tells the composer.

Klimchak "does a close reading of the script and comes prepared," says Garner, who has collaborated with the musician over a decade, including this summer's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Pericles" in 2007, which was nominated for a Suzi Award for best sound design. This year, he won a prestigious Loridans Arts Award for his theater compositions.

"When we do our initial around-the-table readings, he'll chime in with ideas," Garner says, who suspects the composer's first name is David.

Raised in Louisville, Ky., Klimchak came to Atlanta for Emory University, planning one day to become a lawyer. Instead, he followed a circuitous route into theater, including percussionist of Fab Area, an '80s band.

"My dad was a jazz drummer, but music wasn't what you did with your life," Klimchak says. He lives on Atlanta's west side with wife, Anne Cox, a sculptor and photographer.

While his music for "Titus Andronicus" will be a work-in-progress till opening night, his accompaniment for "Midsummer Night's Dream" slipped easily from weird sound effects to formally composed score, back and forth. The extremely wide palette of instruments — played as pools of sound rather than in linear melodies — has become Klimchak's signature style.

Garner also credits Klimchak for helping lift the actors' art to a higher plane. In one key scene in Act Two, for example, Marcus, the title character's brother, discovers that his niece Lavinia has been ravished, her hands and tongue cut off: "a crimson river of warm blood ... doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips ... "

"It's a very interesting 40-line speech," says Garner, "and I told Klimchak it's a flash of a second but we wanted here to suspend time. He reacted by playing a small wooden flute-thing, and it worked immediately.

"Then, at the next rehearsal, I could tell the actor played the same scene matching the pacing of Klimchak's music — they were in perfect synch. Klimchak usually gets it the first time through."

While everything is improvised at the start, by opening night about half the music will be fixed and the rest will be set in a rhythmic framework.

In performance, says Klimchak, "I can better follow the actors if I'm not locked into a score. I love that the music, too, is part of live theater."

Pierre Ruhe blogs about classical music at ArtscriticATL.com