Dramatizing the creation of a new album by a rock quintet in 1976 that bears a distinct resemblance to a mega-popular ensemble from that era, David Adjmi’s play Stereophonic spends three-plus hours immersing the audience in the group’s recording sessions: the playing, the arguing, the drinking and drug-taking, the banal chatter, the boringly idle time in between working on the music. At times incisive, but quite often excruciatingly dull, Stereophonic plays like a less entertaining version of the Beatles’ Get Back, where at least we get to experience real musical genius on display in between the dull bits.

 

Adjmi has rather baldly made his fictional band a dead ringer for Fleetwood Mac: drummer Simon, bassist Reg and keyboard player/vocalist Holly are all English, with the latter two in a rocky marriage. There are also two Americans: Diana, the pretty female singer and Peter, her beau, also a singer and the lead guitarist, who is grabbing the reins of the album’s production whether the others like it or not. The group is recording its followup to its current hit LP, which is peaking—along with its hit single, composed and sung by the American girl—just as the quintet starts on the new opus, which begins as a one-month session but drags on for more than a year, at an astronomical cost and at two studios.

 

Adjmi has fused the making of Fleetwood Mac’s mega-smash Rumours with its commercially disappointing—but more musically expansive—followup, Tusk, for the purposes of squeezing more drops of drama out of what is not very dramatic. David Zinn’s remarkably detailed set consists of the control room’s large 32-track recording console at center stage, where recording engineer Grover and his seemingly anonymous assistant Charlie (there are unfunny jokes made at poor Charlie’s expense) sit, surrounded by chairs, couches and rugs that the band members use; beyond, behind a large window, is the sound room. The entire play consists of conversations and confrontations on either side of the glass, with the group playing their new songs, sometimes in mere snatches and at other times in their entirety. 

 

That the play clocks in at 3 hours and 10 minutes might be thought an act of mercy; after a fuzzy and unfocused, nearly two-hour first act, the second act is much tighter, flying by in a little more than an hour. It’s also where the drama of sorts comes to a head, as Holly and Reg break up nastily, Diana and Peter break up even more nastily, Peter knocks down Grover and briefly fires him for the sin of following Peter’s own directive regarding a new guitar section, and Diana informs Holly that she has been offered a solo album deal by their record label. The dichotomy between the banality of the dialogue and the naked intimacy among these characters yields occasional insights amid the dross.

 

Then there are Will Butler’s songs, which sound more like outtakes from the 1975 “debut” album by the real Fleetwood Mac lineup than the more incisively personal tunes that captivated the rock world on Rumours (not to mention the more experimental tunes on Tusk). And although the cast of five actors playing the musicians perform with appreciable gusto—particularly Sarah Pidgeon, who plays the Stevie Nicks-like Diana captivatingly and with a powerfully impressive singing voice—the songs themselves don’t deserve the time the play gives to them.

 

Aside from Pidgeon, Tom Pecinka (Peter), Will Brill (Reg), Chris Stack (Simon), Juliana Canfield (Holly), Eli Gelb (Grover) and Andrew R. Butler (Charlie) are excellent individually and as an ensemble. Daniel Aukin directs with a fine eye for the details Adjmi has written into the script, like the opening’s tantalizing layering of different conversations a la Robert Altman’s films. If only Aukin had trimmed more of the musical performances (as the group ponders doing in a climactic scene about the extra tracks they’ve recorded), Stereophonic would have been a more entertaining (and less literal) recreation of the bloatedness that began being baked into 1970s rock.