Diane Walsh is a fantastic pianist. As the lights go down in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, Walsh begins her virtuoso performance with the first in Beethoven’s set of thirty-three variations on a theme—the subject matter upon which Moisés Kaufman‘s newest play is based. Thankfully, we get to hear her throughout the evening, playing most of the thirty-three variations on a beautiful grand piano to the side of the stage. The composition is beautiful; the sound is beautiful; her performance is beautiful.

Unfortunately, just as a conductor cannot prevent a train wreck, beautiful accompaniment cannot save 33 Variations. As the first line of the play—Jane Fonda giving a lecture as Dr. Katherine Brandt, a musicologist who is dying of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)—dictates, Let us begin with the primary cause of things. Simply put, the play takes itself too seriously. I almost laughed, but stopped myself, when the entire ensemble started dancing at the end of the piece, and I actually did laugh when characters all sang along to Beethoven’s Mass just a few scenes earlier. How quickly melodrama becomes camp!

The play begins and ends with a lecture prepared by Dr. Brandt, creating a rather snooty stigma about itself that never seems to go away. Probably it never seems to go away because Kaufman continues to employ this same didactic device over and over throughout the piece, not realizing what a patronizing effect such a device can have. At start, we’re prepped by Jane Fonda the dramaturge; at finish, we’re given an analysis of the play from the professor—or the playwright, as it were. This is never a good idea. It comes off as off-putting, as if Kaufman doesn’t trust us enough to come to our own conclusions.

We don’t want the playwright to talk to us; we want the character; we want the actor—we want Jane Fonda. Fonda, unfortunately, is nowhere to be found; instead, we see a hollow shell teaching, travelling, arguing with her daughter, and most of the time, just dying. Although Kaufman sets up a clear conflict between Dr. Brandt and her daughter Clara, he reverts too often to mother-daughter clichés and the characters become caricatured. Kaufman sets the stakes at an initially high point by making Fonda’s character terminally ill, but he seems to disregard other dramatic processes such as the concentration of time and location (the play is set in 1819-1823 Vienna, as well as present-day New York and Bonn, Germany), making the process of Fonda’s death upsettingly slow and, moreover, sloppy.

Alas, the production quality doesn’t fare much better. Dropped lines and wooden portrayals are, sadly, commonplace. Samantha Mathis, as Clara, is one of the worse offenders of the latter. Somewhere between all the yelling and the glaringly trite (not to mention unfunny) awkward humor, I stopped caring, wondering to myself why Clara kept talking so loudly.

I do hope Fonda will return to tackle a role that isn’t simply seemingly meaty, but genuinely so—she’s very talented and surprisingly spry for her age. Also Diane Walsh: I do hope to hear her play again; she truly is a diamond in this rough.