Nothing about a synopsis of Opus will drive people to rush out and see it: a play about the backstage
tensions and harmonies between members of a famous string quartet,
written by a violist-cum-playwright who wants the actors to interact as
the instruments would in a real-life quartet? It sounds so mannered and
fancy, dry as a starched tuxedo shirt. As for
“violist-cum-playwright”—what gall to have enough talent for two
separate, full-time arts careers. You don’t want to buy a ticket to
Michael Hollinger’s play; you want to spit in his eye.
But Hollinger is as good as his résumé (which is to
say, better than we are). Opus is a tense, visceral, and
musical script, performed by excellent local actors and carefully
directed by Braden Abraham (My Name Is Rachel Corrie).
The Lezara String Quartet has fired its inspired and erratically
crazy violist Dorian (Todd Jefferson Moore) and replaced him with a
young, nervous woman named Grace (Chelsey Rives). She has every right
to her nervousness. A tetchy diva named Elliot (Allen Fitzpatrick)
leads the quartet’s other members—a schlumpy divorcée
named Alan (Shawn Belyea) and a grumbling but good-hearted cellist
named Carl (Charles Leggett)—and they all fight with each other.
A lot. The rancor increases as the quartet prepares for a White House
concert honoring a certain two-term philistine. (Grace wonders if it
matters that she didn’t vote for him. “None of us voted for him,”
Elliot replies. “He’s a pig.”) The ghost of Dorian haunts the
rehearsals and the script: He appears in flashbacks, flitting
carelessly about the stage, sometimes catalyzing arguments, sometimes
diffusing them, always unpredictable. But once he’s gone, the arguments
don’t stop.
Opus details the crucible of collaboration and all the
hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing required to make something beautiful.
(One hopes the actors were more cordial to each other than their
characters.) Everyone turns in great performances. Moore is flighty,
charming, and infuriating; Rives hides a few razors beneath her
blushes; Fitzpatrick is fussy and driven; Belyea slouches and flirts
with a rogue’s charm; and Leggett is the play’s basso profundo, giving
Opus its ballast. In the beginning, he tells a joke. A string
quartet, he says, is “a good violinist, a bad violinist, a former
violinist, and somebody who doesn’t care about the violin.” The joke
first seems like a light embellishment—but it’s a leitmotif that
comes to a shocking conclusion. 
The contrapuntal interactions you’ve described seem only normal for any “ensemble” group. Give me a group of people working together and I’ll show you drama and teeth gnashing galore.
To use a string quartet, where harmony is the ultimate goal, and rip it apart with psychological malaise and destructive interaction is as if the musicians have taken Mozart and translated the music into Ligeti or the rumblings and dissonace of Schoenberg. And that is where true art appears.
I am in Los Angeles, but I’m so fascinated by the description of this piece that I’m flying up to Seattle to catch the last weekend. I hope many of your local readers hear the leitmotif in the North Western pines.