Margot is on a rooftop, thinking she might jump, when Fax appears below and talks her down.
Teenagers in a summer music program, they will alter each other’s lives, and this is how they meet: mid-emergency, with Fax babbling purposefully until the danger ebbs.
“I always have a lot to share,” she says, hyper-competent and buying time. “My mom calls me an over-communicator, but for me it’s just right.”
In language, Fax could improvise all day. In music, Margot could do the same, exhilarated by the unexpected. But a crisis at home that she isn’t about to mention has her up on that campus rooftop in Northern California, and in this moment she does not see a way through.
“Never been to this part of my life,” Margot says, and isn’t that just the human condition.
Eisa Davis’s “Girls Girls Chance Chance Music Music,” at the Vineyard Theater (the playwright renders the title with musical repeat symbols), is a play with live music. It is also a love letter to creativity and collaboration, to fleeting youthful friendships that become touchstone memories, and to artistic spaces that allow girls to thrive in one another’s company — at least when the kids themselves aren’t getting in the way of that.
Fax (Hillary Fisher) is a singer, Margot (Naomi Latta) is a drummer, and each is passionate about music in a way that not everyone in their gifted-and-talented program shares. But Fax is a perfectionist who feels most secure adhering to music as written. Having to riff throws her off, and if someone does that onstage with her, she will angrily accuse them of going rogue.
The story of Fax and Margot’s nascent friendship, and of the sexual tension inside it, is about Margot coaxing Fax away from her good-girl rigidity into the understanding that she can follow her own rhythms and make up her own score.
“It’s just freedom,” says Margot, who is in pursuit not of perfection but of trailblazing new sounds.
Davis’s formally daring play amps up the risk intrinsic to live theater, introducing a new element at every performance: a sequence of 12 notes, each chosen preshow by audience members, that the cast of four plays, sings and improvises on intermittently throughout the show. If, say, you don’t notice the display in the lobby, it is possible to be unaware of that innovation. I was, so any excitement it might have held was lost on me.
Directed by Pam MacKinnon, the play is more poetic and deep-rooted on the page than it seems in three dimensions. Look at this stage direction for Margot, practicing her drums: “It’s a sad, slow, deeply felt playing in a 5/4 time signature, completely inside the heartbeat of the Earth.” Or the one that says Fax and Margot “speaking their sonic language” to each other “is like a first kiss.” Somehow the play doesn’t quite let us into its small, self-contained world.
It hasn’t found a balance, either, between portraying musical dedication and holding our interest as the students — including the pianist Rile (Yeena Sung) and the multi-instrumentalist Clementine (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera) — practice and noodle. Their individual practice rooms are strikingly handsome, though, on a set by Nina Ball that evokes music, redwoods and precariousness.
Of the classmates, Margot is living the most unstable life, behind a defensive facade of aggression and dismissiveness. She is meant to be so ferociously talented that other musicians want to be around her anyway, but I didn’t buy the force with which Fax is drawn to her. The script doesn’t ask Margot to have charisma, and she isn’t played that way, but it would make a more persuasive case.
Davis dedicates the play to a roll call of her own music teachers, and her program biography notes that she studied classical piano at the Young Musicians Program in Berkeley, Calif., from age 10 to 17 — “some of the happiest days of her life.” It makes sense, then, that some of the show’s most beautiful moments are in the glimpses of the grown-up lives its four teenagers will lead: who stays in music or doesn’t, who travels the world playing shows.
“Even though music is out of my life,” one character says, looking back from adulthood, “it built my life.”
But really, it can’t be out of her life. As her younger self knew, music is everywhere.
Girls Girls Chance Chance Music Music Through June 21 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
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