Synesthesia

by Lance Tait

A visiting professor of music from Denmark, Christian Sorensen, is dead. Another professor at the Tchaikovsky conservatoire, Natalia Marchuik, died two months later. Detective Andriy Yevchenko comes to Professor Lydia Perova’s office to question her about the deceased teachers. He says he suspects that some disgruntled music composition student – a mad genius – has killed the professors as part of large scale frontier-breaking musical symphony that incorporates reality (murder) into its musical drama. It is a far-fetched theory, but Yevchenko thinks it is possible. He is completely lying. His real target is Professor Perova. In CurtainUp.com David Lipfert “There is another interesting drama at this year’s Fringe, Lance Tait’s Synesthesia in its world premiere. Detective Yevchenko (Damian Corcoran) interviews musicology professor Perova (Stephanie Campion) to solve a recent double murder there at the Kiev Conservatory. Yevchenko has done his homework. He has gathered rich detail about the two deceased visiting professors, a couple that had formed a liaison, and their relationship to Perova. He also knows a lot about composers like Alexander Scriabin that attempted in their highly emotional works to combine all the senses, or synesthesia. It’s an odd topic for guarded and emotionally stunted Perova, like many people that develop intense careers from childhood. Alternatingly probing and reassuring, he succeeds in dislodging her feelings – jealousy of the dead woman and love for the man. Seconded by Tait’s musical score of electronics plus opera, she imagines conversing with the man of her dreams in mini mad scenes. Yevchenko’s hunch is right. Playwright Lance Tait has done his musical homework as well. The musical references are not the usual superficial variety, and the psychological dimension is believably explored. Masterful acting by Corcoran and Campion plus Tait’s superb direction make a winning combination.” “Synesthesia” itself refers to the phenomenon of the senses getting crossed--colors are heard, music and fragrances are seen, etc. In the play, there is discussion of music compositions that go beyond the realm of sound and into realms of sight, smell, touch and the mystical. There was an extensive original soundtrack used in the play's New York performances.This is a two-character play.

56 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 18, 2013

About the author

"Werewolf and Idol" is Lance Tait's first novel. His extensive work for the stage includes theatrical adaptations of 17 short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. His one-act and full-length plays (40+ in total) have been produced or received staged readings in New York, Boston, the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, Los Angeles, Denver, Toronto, the United Kingdom, South Africa, South Korea and Paris, France. He is also the author of popular comedy sketches published on Amazon. In 2002, he founded Theatre Metropole in Paris. He has been active as a director/writer/producer of short films on the internet, as well.

Influences and likes (novelists): Sherwood Anderson (“Winesburg, Ohio”), Honoré de Balzac, Emily Brontë, François-René de Chateaubriand, Anton Chekhov, Philip K Dick, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hermann Hesse, Stanisław Lem, Mario Vargas Llosa, Edgar Lee Masters (“Spoon River Anthology”), Herman Melville, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Shelley, Frank G. Slaughter, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Stendhal, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Kurt Vonnegut, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf; (short story authors) Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe.