It's a big week for playwright Melanie Marnich. Wednesday night her contemporary road “dramedy”Quake opened the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

        Friday night, the Children's Theatre will debut her Beethoven by Heart, a play for young people about the great composer and his hearing loss. It will feature performers from National Theatre of the Deaf.

Marnich

        Ms. Marnich won't have a chance to see Beethoven this weekend because she's also getting ready for an off-Broadway opening of her award-winning Blur, which premiered last year at the US WEST Festival of New American Plays. Blur opens in May at Manhattan Theatre Club.

        “It is hard to take it all in,” Ms. Marnich said from Louisville last weekend. “Pinch me.”

        Ms. Marnich, a native of Duluth, Minn., is living in Minneapolis, where, as a recipient of Jerome and McKnight fellowships, her responsibilities include a playwrighting residency.

        But she first tried her wings as a playwright in Cincinnati in the mid-'90s. She was working in a local advertising agency and trying to write fiction, but it never felt right.

        Purely by chance she went to a community theater with some friends “and I went, "that's what I hear in my head! Dialogue. I see dimension.''

IF YOU GO

Colby Loveland and Matthew Nil in Beethoven by Heart     What: Beethoven by Heart     When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.     Where: Taft Theatre, Fifth and Sycamore streets, downtown.     Tickets: $14, $12 and $5. 562-4949.    What: Quake    When: In repertory through March 31    Where: Actors Theatre of Lousiville, 316 Main St., Louisville.    Tickets: $28, $18 Friday and Saturday nights; $22.50 and $16 Sunday-Thursday nights and Saturday matinees; (800) 428—5849.

        She joined a playwrighting group (that eventually evolved into Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative.)

        Her first paycheck for playwrighting came in the form of a $10,000 individual fellowship from Ohio Arts Council granted on the basis of her play Beautiful Again, which was read at Ensemble Theatre.

        Shortly afterward, she received her first commission, from the Children's Theatre, for Jack and the Beanstalk.

        Ms. Marnich left Cincinnati in 1996 for a two-year graduate program in playwriting at University of California-San Diego, but she maintained her relationship with the Children's Theatre, which she says, “I hope will continue.”

        While her work is becoming more adult, writing plays for children isn't kids stuff, she says. ""Beethoven presented every challenge a grown-up theater piece has.

        “It took so much research. And he's such an icon. The size of the subject gave me writer's block a few times. I'd ask myself, "Who am I to shine a new light on this?'

        “In the end, I tackled it the only way I could, to make him a human being and give myself a certain license. To saturate myself in the research and then let it go and write the story of a man with his own demons.”

        Beethoven opens with the composer as a gifted child, then moves through his early career teaching piano to untalented patrons and his increasing deafness to the creation of the Ninth Symphony. With his deafness, Ms. Marnich ventures, “maybe he could hear himself better.”

        Young Beethoven and his best friend are played by Matthew Nill and Colby Loveland, both students at St. Rita's School for the Deaf.

        Beethoven will be performed using American Sign Language as well as the spoken word.

        According to National Theatre of the Deaf artistic manager Mike Lamitola, Beethoven was a collaborative effort.

        Speaking through a sign language interpreter, Mr. Lamitola explained the division of labor. “Jack (Louiso) directed and choreographed. He did the blocking and oversaw the technical aspects.

        “I kept my eye on the acting. My emphasis was on how the show looked on the actors — to create the visual equivalent of what the hearing audience is listening to. Jack concentrated on the sound.

        “Then these two things had to be brought together in a balance. The final decisions were Jack's.”
       

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