In a Pair of Musicals, Gabriel Kahane Seeks America and Himself

Photo: Marc J. Franklin

The 2016 election and the COVID pandemic: the two major moments of the past eight years that are irresistible to dramatists but are notoriously tricky to get right. I have to admit that whenever I see either mentioned in a synopsis in my program, I get that involuntary stomach clench — will this be heavy-handed, sentimental, too close to its subject? In two journeys in alternating solo performances at Playwrights Horizons, Gabriel Kahane, armed with a piano and a cozy sweater, boldly but humbly runs right toward both events, singing himself on some of the expected tropes along the way, but steering, eventually, away from the expected toward larger self-reflection. In Magnificent Bird, which is encouraged to be seen as the first act, Kahane describes his experience of trying to detox from the internet, a quest for inner peace and clarity that’s complicated by the fact he embarked on it just before the onset of the COVID pandemic. In Book of Travelers, which takes place earlier chronologically but is suggested as the second panel of the diptych, Kahane sets out on a soul-searching journey by train in the weeks after the 2016 election. Originally booked as what Kahane, in a typically self-conscious bit of self-abasement, says he imagined would be a victory lap over the defeated, the journey instead becomes about his fumbling for sense in the country’s divisions.

Kahane’s manner is, like his music, unpretentious, though shot through with dark humor and whimsy. He’s made a name for himself both as a encyclopedic composer who synthesized the history of Los Angeles by way of real estate in The Ambassador and, as he acknowledges in Magnificent Bird, with a series of mini-compositions based on chum of social media, whether tweets from Mitt Romney or Craigslist listings. Those kinds of works, like New Yorker cartoons, can fall on the wrong side of precious pretty quickly, being all light comedy of manners with little heft. In Bird, you see Kahane, anxious about what his addiction to the endless scroll has done to him, try to slow the flywheel of his mind down and self-reflect, while also lampooning the friends and family who got worked up about his new monklike phoneless experience — one friend, he says with a twinkle of piano keys, figured out a loophole in just texting Kahane’s wife, which made her all the more frustrated. Once Kahane slows down, however, so does the world: So we get a few deeper ruminations on quieter life in Portland, where he moved at the start of the pandemic, and the dissociation of trying to mourn lost family through the pandemic-imposed distance.

The artistic difficulty, however, lies in the fact that this is well-traveled territory, both in the concept of leaving the internet behind to find something “real” and in a similar process happening in early days of lockdown. You may feel as if you’ve heard this tune before, no matter how well-crafted it may be. Annie Tippe, who directed this pair of shows with trademark clear-eyed straightforwardness, also did Dave Malloy’s Three Houses. Kahane, sitting at his piano onstage here in a meticulous re-creation of his Portland studio, may well be sitting in a fourth house.

In Book of Travelers, Kahane sets out on the trip with a similar sense of preordination. A majority of the tickets for Amtrak circuits of the country must surely be bought with the intention of writing something about time spent on the rails, presumably with the theme of “America” in mind. But while Kahane does labor under familiar tropes here — most of all, the coastal liberal’s combined romanticism of, sense of displacement from, and fear of the heartland — he finds his way through with little observations, like the details of the regular menu and the feeling of being stuck in delays with people with whom you’re intimate and yet not at a station, that complicate and enhance the travelogue. A moving thread emerges as he superimposes his journey with that of his grandmother’s trip across Germany as she fled the Nazis in the late 1930s. Layered onto that, there’s a scene where he’s asked to sing hymns with a group of young men who are Old Order German Baptist Brethren, of a sect similar to the Amish (though they tell Kahane they use more modern conveniences). They are, for their part, surprised to meet a Jewish man. Strangers have always been meeting this way for as long as there have been trains, but in that moment, Kahane still finds a way to set this particular collision, weighted with history, into lovely harmony.

Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers are at Playwrights Horizons.