Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn Come Alive in a New Production Off-Broadway.

Berlin, 1828. A piano. A woman who will die with most of her music unpublished. And a playwright who has the rare good sense to let that injustice speak for itself.

Annalisa Chamberlin plays the title role in Tim McGillicuddy’s Fanny: A Fantasy in G

Fanny: A Fantasy in G, Tim McGillicuddy’s new play presented by Off-Brand Opera at the Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York, tells the story of Fanny Mendelssohn — composer, woman, Jew, sister of Felix — and her lifelong struggle to claim her voice in a world not yet prepared to welcome it. McGillicuddy neither sensationalizes nor reaches for false modern parallels. He simply shows what happened, in a parlor, at a piano, over the course of a life. That discipline is the play’s greatest strength.

Let me begin where the play itself begins and ends: the piano. Seated at it throughout, dressed entirely in black, is the figure the production calls the Muse — played with quiet, devastating presence by Melody Fader. She is always there. She never leaves. She plays. She watches. She waits. The production calls her the Muse. I see in her Morgan le Fay — the Arthurian sorceress of death and enchantment transposed into a Berlin salon. She is the unblinking reminder that genius is mortal, that beauty is borrowed, that time is always running out. Dressed in black and seated at that piano, she accompanies every joy and every loss with equal serenity. In a play about a Jewish family in a Germany that did not yet exist but was already dreaming of itself, her presence carries an additional, unbearable weight. We know what is coming. She seems to know it too.

The Mendelssohn household is rendered as a greenhouse — a place of seedlings, of cultivated talent, of warmth and contained possibility. At its center stand two figures that resist the designation of “supporting roles.” Rufus Collins as Abraham Mendelssohn is the bourgeois patriarch in the fullest sense: capitalist, altruist, philanthropist. He funds beauty and enables his family’s creativity while, we learn, quietly and secretly aiding the Jewish community in the Berlin ghetto — operating in the shadows because the shadows are all that is available to him. Úna Clancy as Lea Mendelssohn is, if anything, more formidable still. She is the true architect of the family’s emotional architecture, and Clancy never lets you forget it. These are the pillars on which everything else rests, and both actors seem to know it.

A scene from Tim McGillicuddy’s Fanny: A Fantasy in G, directed by George Abud

Everything rests, too, on a question that runs beneath the music like an underground current: who are we? The Mendelssohns, like much of the Jewish bourgeoisie in 19th-century Berlin, were engaged in the profound and ultimately tragic project of becoming German. Not Prussian, not Polish, not visibly Jewish — German. This was not merely social aspiration. It was a response to something in the air: the Romantic nationalist dream of Germania, the Kaiser’s call to all Germanic peoples to unite under a shared language, blood, and destiny. A nation being willed into existence. The Mendelssohns wanted to be part of it. The nation, in the end, would decide otherwise.

These questions have a way of following you. Working on a film about Peter Paul Weischenk — the cinematographer who fled Berlin in 1933 — and before that on a project concerning composer George Bristow and the construction of American national identity, the same unresolved tensions keep surfacing. What does it cost to build a national identity in the nineteenth century? And what does it cost those who are allowed to contribute to that project only on borrowed terms? Academia today circles this endlessly and often arrives nowhere. McGillicuddy does not circle it. He puts it in a room, seats it at a dinner table, and lets it eat with the family.

These questions are not of the past. Berlin and New York are asking them again right now, in different registers and with different accents. That the play never makes this argument explicitly is, again, a measure of its intelligence.

McGillicuddy and director George Abud solve the challenge of spanning decades with similar economy — dimming the lights and moving forward, past the deaths of Abraham and Lea, past the accumulated weight of years, with a simplicity that feels almost musical. The transgenerational burden lands without being announced.

And then there is the music. This is not a musical. It is a play in which music breathes. You are not watching performers sing their emotions. You are sitting next to a piano in a Berlin salon and the music is simply happening, the way it would have happened then — as the atmosphere of a life. The works of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn fill the Gural Theatre with a beauty the drama alone could not produce. You hear it. You feel it. You are inside it.

Abud’s direction is assured and, at its best, quietly inventive. One gesture in particular stayed with me: at moments of particular weight, when something essential is being said at the center of the stage, the actors in the background slip into a forced slow motion. The world slows to let the words land. It is the kind of touch that works precisely because it does not call attention to itself.

Fanny: A Fantasy in G is a play about a forgotten woman, a vanishing world, and a family trying to hold beauty together against forces it cannot name and cannot stop. It is beautifully written, beautifully directed, and played with intelligence and care throughout.