This weekend, the Thunder River Theatre Company (TRTC) and BenFeng Music Productions will present the U.S. premier of the innovative, genre-blending play “Kreutzer.”

Fusing three historically connected works — Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” for violin, Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Kreutzer Sonata” and Leoš Janáček’s String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata” — the play offers an immersive, multi-genre story of jealousy, betrayal, love and grief. 

“I always find the difference between arts and entertainment is that in arts, you challenge your audience, and so in this production, we do,” MinTze Wu, “Kreutzer” co-artistic director, said. 

Beethoven’s famously challenging “Kreutzer Sonata,” dedicated to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, inspired Tolstoy’s novella. In the novella, a man suspects that his wife, a pianist, is having an affair with a violinist. Consumed by jealousy, he ultimately kills her. Tolstoy’s work, in turn, inspired Janáček’s string quartet. 

More than two centuries after Beethoven composed the original piece, Wu, a violinist and co-founder of BenFeng Music Productions, wove the three masterworks into a single theatrical and musical experience.

“To put these three masterpieces over the span of 120 years together in the environment of a theater offers a very unique and very transformative way of experiencing music,” Wu said. “That’s the fascination, the exploration and curiosity — each of them stands by themselves as a timeless piece, what happens when they exist together?”

The play was first performed by BenFeng Music Productions in Taiwan in 2019, and will now make its U.S. debut at Carbondale’s Thunder River Theatre on Friday. 

“I’ve always been really curious about the intersection of arts — music, literature and theater —  but music does remain the core of BenFeng Music Productions,” Wu said. “A lot of times, people are like, what is this? What are you doing? Is this a concert? No, it’s more than a concert. Is it musical theater? No, it’s not musical theater. It’s really our way to continue to live in this intersection and see how we can bring the music to a place where we can relive it in the imagination of the composers.”

Almost all the performers in “Kreutzer” are classical musicians who share their musical talents live during the show. Pozdnyshev is portrayed by local actor Micha Schoepe. The role of wife and violin one is performed by Wu; the lover and piano by Chi-Long Hu; the lawyer and viola by Chieh-Fan Yiu; the old man and cello one by Michael Graham; the lady and cello two by Jacob Danelle and passenger and violin two by Delaney Meyers. 

Although violist Yiu is also a founding member of BenFeng Music Productions, each performance continues to challenge him, pushing him beyond his classical background and into a world of mutli-faceted productions. 

“I still remember the first time I joined the first BenFeng in Taiwan. It was a deer in headlights moment,” Yiu said. “I come from a classical viola performing background, and I had to embody a lot more than just my viola playing.

“I had to tap into acting and I had to tap into poetry and working together with people that are not in my usual wheelhouse,” he added. “…I think that kind of challenge really brings us together — nobody has an easy job and everyone is doing something more than just their wheelhouse and I think that’s a really beautiful converging of crafts.”

The production team includes Wu and TRTC’s Missy Moore as co-artistic directors, with Mike Monroney serving as stage director. 

“I was really quite flattered to be asked to be involved,” Monroney said. “(I was) given some license to take what was done and reimagine it for the space and the personnel that we have and find different ways of exploring the relationships, both between the music and the dramatic part of the story, but also within the context of the characters within the story.

“That’s been really fun for me — to try and preserve MinTze’s artistic vision in terms of how she originally conceived the piece, but to make some tweaks and changes so that it suits the time and place that we’re performing it in,” he added.

Audiences can expect full immersion in the emotive play from the very first scene.

“(The musicians) are thrown immediately out of their wheelhouse and expected to amplify these ideas that are essential and integral to the story that Tolstoy is trying to tell and we are trying to tell through the music,” Monroney said. “I like to think that the music that’s often playing under, behind and during the dramatic action in the show is amplifying the subtext, the things that the actors don’t actually say but are feeling — the music is helping us understand what’s going on inside their heads.” 

The production invites attendees to explore the rich intersection of music and literature while witnessing “world class musicians performing timeless pieces on a stage with an intimacy that they would rarely get to see,” Monroney said. “Then (the audience) watches that story through the music — I love the circular aspect of it, music to literature, back to music — and become part of that.”