Theater of War, Part 1

 

Theater of War Productions is a “social impact” theater company, co-founded in 2009 by Bryan Doerries and Phyllis Kaufman, who served as producing director from 2009 to 2016.  Doerries (pronounced DOOR-eez) is the company’s current artistic director.  (The date of Theater of War’s founding is reported variously in other sources, with years earlier than 2009, but that is the year ToW puts on its website (Home - Theater of War).

Theater of War presents unstaged dramatic readings to create community-specific projects that “address pressing public health and social issues,” according to their website.  In the beginning, they addressed soldiers and veterans, but they have expanded their audience focus and have presented readings for nurses, corrections officers, public health workers, and even convicts.

The readings are performed by casts that include well-known professional actors such as Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Adam Driver, Jesse Eisenberg, Paul Giamatti, Jake Gyllenhaal, Alfred Molina, Samira Wiley, Jay O. Sanders, Frankie Faison, and David Strathairn.  Many of these prominent film, television, and stage performers have done several ToW projects.

The pros form the core of the readings’ casts, but they are joined by members of the target community, including senior officials and administrators.  At first, the texts were exclusively classic Greek tragedies, such as Ajax (442 or 441 BCE), Oedipus the King (429-420 BCE), and Antigone (441 BCE) by Sophocles (497/496-406/405 BCE) and Aeschylus’ (525/524-456 BCE) Prometheus Bound (ca. 430 BCE).  Sometimes this included non-dramatic texts, such as readings from The Iliad.

Soon Theater of War began using more modern classics, such as in their current project, Norwegian playwright and theater director Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) An Enemy of the People (1882).  ToW will also use contemporary dramas for the right project. 

Doerries has a background and training in the classics and stage directing.  He’s also a writer and translator, and he composes the translations and adaptations of the texts used for ToW’s readings.  In his biographical sketch on the Theater of War website, Doerries calls himself ”an evangelist for ancient stories and their relevance to our lives today.”

The readings are designed to confront social issues highlighted in the plays.  (Ibsen’s Enemy, as you’ll read, is a 19th-century drama at whose center is a controversy that greatly resembles the COVID pandemic, with a central character who can be seen as an avatar of Dr. Anthony Fauci.)  The readings are followed by town hall-style panel discussions which are intended to draw out “raw and personal reactions” to the themes of the plays.  

“The guided discussions underscore how the plays resonate with contemporary audiences,” states the ToW website, “and invite audience members to share their perspectives and experiences, . . . helping to break down stigmas, foster empathy, compassion, and a deeper understanding of complex issues.”

[I’ve selected two articles that report on the work of Theater of War.  The first is the transcript of a segment from the PBS News Hour and focuses on the production of An Enemy of the People.  The second is a review of Brian Doerries’s book describing and explaining the work of his troupe, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.

[There is a surfeit of coverage of ToW’s work over the decade-and-a-half of its existence.  I’ll be posting a few more pieces dealing with different plays and communities.  The next post will be published on Tuesday, 25 June.]

*  *  *  *
“THEATER ADAPTS ‘AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE’
TO ADDRESS PUBLIC HEALTH AFTER THE PANDEMIC”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[Correspondent Jeffrey Brown’s report on Bryan Doerries’s Theater of War project was aired on PBS News Hour on 7 June 2024. (Note that the broadcast has recently changed its name slightly.)]

Geoff Bennett [PBS News Hour Co-Anchor]: Actors, experts and community members are turning to a classic play to address contemporary trauma and tensions from the pandemic.

Jeffrey Brown has this look as part of our new series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy. It’s part of our ongoing arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

Actor [Jay O. Sanders, in reading from stage]: Yesterday, you said that the water supply was contaminated by impurities in the soil.

David Strathairn, Actor [in reading]: Yes, exactly. The source is undoubtedly the toxic swamp up in Mildale.

Jeffrey Brown: A major health crisis has been discovered. The water in a local spa is contaminated. Lives and the economy are threatened. The public must be told, or should it?

Actor [in reading]: We must bury it for the good of the people.

Jeffrey Brown: Who decides, and who decides what actions, if any, to take? At stake, public health and democracy itself.

Bryan Doerries, Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions: This play is about a public health catastrophe that was in the late 19th century, in 1882. It’s made up, but it could be today.

And it creates the context where we can talk about not just what just happened over the last four years, but how do we ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

Let’s do the first couple pages.

Jeffrey Brown: Bryan Doerries is founder and artistic director of Theater of War Productions, which turns to ancient and classic plays to explore and spur discussion of contemporary issues and trauma.

Actress [in reading]: He has the thousand-yard stare.

Jeffrey Brown: We watched in 2010 as he used Greek tragedy that still speaks to the rise in suicide rates in today’s military, presented at a base.

And, in 2016, in a Missouri community torn apart after the killing of a young Black man, Michael Brown, in “Antigone in Ferguson.”

Actress [in reading]: Because there is nothing shameful in loyalty to a brother!

Bryan Doerries: I see it as a form of mediation. These ancient texts that we perform or the texts of the classical plays we perform create a kind of vocabulary for people to talk about hard things.

Protesters [“plants” in audience]: No more shots! No more shots!

Jeffrey Brown: Now a pandemic that took well over a million lives in the U.S. alone, uncertain, at times chaotic government responses, masks weaponized, public health officials threatened.

Frankie Faison, Actor [in reading]: Concoct all those conspiracies you can think of.

Jeffrey Brown: Here seen through the lens of an enduring 19th century play, “An Enemy of the People” by Henrik Ibsen about a doctor named Thomas Stockmann who wants to protect his community . . .

[The book on An Enemy of the People (Norwegian: En folkefiende): The play was published on 28 November 1882. Its reception was mixed, unsurprisingly, as Stockmann’s harsh remarks about political parties offended all the reviewers, who belonged to one or another party.  

[The first English translation (originally rendered as An Enemy of Society) was made in 1888 by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1855-98), a daughter of Karl Marx (1818-83) and an influential socialist activist in her own right. Arthur Miller (1915-2005) made a popular adaptation in 1950 which was performed on Broadway in 1950-51. A film version based on Miller’s adaptation came out in 1978 with Steve McQueen (1930-80) as Stockmann. For Theater of War, Doerries created his own adaptation based on the Miller text.

[Enemy was first performed in Christiania (now Oslo) on 13 January 1883. It was quickly taken up by theaters in Denmark and Sweden, and then around Western Europe, eventually playing at the Moscow Art Theater in 1900. The play’s London première was on 14 June 1893 at the Haymarket Theatre, with Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917) as Stockmann, in a production that later went on tour to the United States, playing in New York City at Abbey’s Theatre at Broadway and 38th Street in what’s now Manhattan’s Garment District in April 1895.

[A current Broadway production, unrelated to the Theater of War readings, opened at the Circle in the Square Theatre in the Times Square district on 18 March 2024 (for a limited run until 23 June), adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, with Jeremy Strong as Dr. Stockmann and Michael Imperioli as his brother, the mayor. The production received five Tony nominations (including for Best Revival of a Play) and won one (Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for Strong).

[Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in response to the harsh criticism with which Ghosts (1881) had been received, but the plot of Enemy had its origin in two actual incidents. Alfred Meissner (German: Meißner; 1822-85), a young Austrian poet whom Ibsen knew in Munich, had told him how, when his father, Eduard (1785-1868), had been a medical officer at the Bohemian spa of Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic) in the 1830s, there was an outbreak of cholera which the doctor felt it his duty to make known publicly. As a result, the season was ruined and the citizens of Teplitz became so enraged that they stoned the doctor’s house and forced him to flee the town.

[Then there had been the case in Norway of a pharmacist named Harald Thaulow (1815-81). For nearly 10 years, Thaulow had heatedly attacked the Christiania Steam Kitchens, ostensibly a charitable organization to feed the city’s poor while actually a profit­making scheme riddled with graft, for neglecting their duty toward the impoverished. He had delivered a violent speech on the subject in 1874 during Ibsen’s visit to Norway, and on 23 February 1881, only a fortnight before he died, Thaulow attempted to read a prepared speech at the annual meeting of the Steam Kitchens.

[The chairman of the meeting tried to prevent Thaulow from speaking, and eventually the public forced him, amid commotion, to withdraw. Ibsen read a report of this meeting in the Aftenposten (Oslo’s daily newspaper, regarded as the paper of record for Norway) of 24 February, just at the time when his indignation at the reception of Ghosts (1881) was reaching its climax.]

David Strathairn [in reading]: They will all have my back if things get ugly.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . but who in the process reveals his own biases and flaws and becomes both hero and enemy.

It was presented recently in what Doerries referred to as a temple of experts, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., in reading [sic] by top actors, including David Strathairn . . .

David Strathairn [in reading]: This might just do nobody any good.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . known for such films as “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which brought an Oscar nomination for best actor [as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow (1908-65)] . . .

David Strathairn [in a film clip]: That’s Jason Bourne.

Jeffrey Brown: . . . and for the blockbuster Bourne movies, here playing Dr. Stockmann.

David Strathairn: He’s a hero. He’s — he could be a civic servant, civil servant, a doctor, and do no harm, and that’s what he’s trying not to do.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re calling him a hero, but then, in the play, many see him as . . .

David Strathairn: As an enemy.

Jeffrey Brown: As an enemy.

David Strathairn: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Did that resonate for the way you see things today?

David Strathairn: Yeah. Yeah, in a word. I mean, yeah. I mean, there’s so many more issues than just him being an enemy. It’s about the press, the media . . .

Frankie Faison, Actor: The money.

David Strathairn: The money.

Frankie Faison: Politics.

David Strathairn: The politics of the situation, which are — it goes without saying how present those things are in our lives today.

Frankie Faison [clip from The Wire]: The Barksdale case was a successful prosecution.

Jeffrey Brown: Like Strathairn, actor Frankie Faison, best known from “The Wire” and the Hannibal Lecter films, has joined many Theater of War projects over the years.

Frankie Faison: I got a chance to work with amazing actors and amazing texts, I mean, scripts that are just brilliant. You got a chance to exercise that vocal thing without any pressure. You don’t have to worry about critics being on top of us, and you do this. It’s a sharing.

And we share this information. And then, through that sharing, it opens up a conversation with the audience that just blows our mind.

Jeffrey Brown: This audience included many in the public health community, several of whom took part in the performance from the audience, including Professor Jeffrey Kahn . . .

Jeffrey Kahn, Johns Hopkins University [in reading]: If you’re talking about me . . .

Jeffrey Brown: . . . director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, here playing a drunken citizen.

Jeffrey Kahn: I don’t think we all appreciated that public health professionals would be attacked for their views. That’s never happened in our lifetime.

Dr. Vivian Pinn, Director, NIH [National Institutes of Health] Office of Research on Women’s Health: Yes, that’s right.

Jeffrey Kahn: But here’s Ibsen, who wrote a play in 1882, writing about exactly that.

Jeffrey Brown: But there’s a twist. Here, the health experts play average citizens angry about the upheaval to their lives that the doctor is proposing.

Jeffrey Kahn: We are taking the position of shouting down the experts. So it’s a bit of a turning of the tables.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes, how does that feel?

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Kahn: It feels uncomfortable. I think that’s exactly the point.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Dr. Vivian Pinn: Yes.

Jeffrey Kahn: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Dr. Vivian Pinn, the first full-time director of the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health, has been through such battles.

To her, Dr. Stockmann was right in his science, but wrong in his interaction with the community, insulting the townspeople for not recognizing his expertise or following his demands.

David Strathairn [in reading]: How in God’s name can it ever be right for the wise to be ruled over by fools?

(Booing from “audience”)

Dr. Vivian Pinn: I was really kind of concerned when I was reading the script for this play at some of Dr. Stockmann’s comments about the lower class, the poor, the dirty, and I was thinking, yikes, what we’re really focusing on today in public health is being able to interact with the community, get the community involved in what we’re doing.

Jeffrey Brown: Still, she says, the tension hits home.

Dr. Vivian Pinn: Yes, he’s not right in everything he says, but, gee whiz, don’t you want to listen to the truth?

Jeffrey Brown: Such questions were then taken up by panel members, an emergency services paramedic lieutenant.

Man [from stage in panel discussion with audience]: During the pandemic, which this play resonates so deeply with, there was such certainty in the way people spoke that they planted the seeds of the automatic response when people speak from such certainty of, how do you know what you’re talking about? I know I didn’t know what I was seeing.

I saw it in [the] front line. I was going to, on 13 — average, 10 to 13 cardiac arrests a day. I didn’t know what was going on. How do they know?

Jeffrey Brown: Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.

Dr. Francis Collins, Former Director, National Institutes of Health [in panel discussion]: I’m always looking to find a hero. I always feel like there ought to be one. I didn’t find one in this play.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: A local business owner.

Woman [in panel discussion]: But how do you gain back the trust of officials and government and people that are in charge that you wanted to — that you believed in the beginning.

Jeffrey Brown: And members of the audience.

Woman [from audience]: As much as we want a hero, heroes do not monopolize truth, capital T. They may have a slice of truth.

Man [from audience]: Full disclosure, I’m a Catholic priest. This idea of learning how to trust each other again, which means learning how to love each other again, and recognizing that that is going to involve humility, of people recognizing they’re wrong.

Woman [from audience]: I was struck by the absence of an independent press in this play. A free press is essential to a democratic society.

Jeffrey Brown: Ultimately, just as in real life, the public health crisis in the play becomes a test of democracy itself.

In fact, says Bryan Doerries:

Bryan Doerries: I think the core critique is in the public health. It’s, can this kind of democracy work?

Jeffrey Brown: Right.

Bryan Doerries: And we’re entering 2024 with a giant crowd scene with people screaming at a stage and chanting vile things at someone who’s trying to help them, who then chants vile things back at them.

Seems like an appropriate place to start this election year and to be framing conversations.

Jeffrey Brown: Following the National Academy of Sciences performance, Theater of War Productions took “An Enemy of the People” to audiences in rural Ohio, next stop outdoors in New York’s Times Square on June 12.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Washington, D.C 

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. 

[As arts correspondent, Brown has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.  Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

*  *  *  *
“‘THE THEATER OF WAR,’ BY BRYAN DOERRIES”
Reviewed by James Shapiro 

[In 2015, Doerries wrote a book about his classic theater work with various groups.  He entitled his volume the same as his project, The Theater of War.  Below is the New York Times review, published on 2 October 2015, of the book.]

The theater of ancient Greece was many things: a literary competition; a Dionysian religious rite; a place where citizens gathered to see plays that explored pressing social and political concerns; and through its portrayal of human suffering, a site of collective catharsis.

It is the last of these, especially the therapeutic potential of catharsis, that most interests Bryan Doerries. Trained as a classicist and theater director, and scarred by witnessing the suffering and death of his girlfriend and his father, Doerries sought in these old plays methods of dealing with unhealed wounds. “The Theater of War” recounts these and other experiences that led him to found a company that shares its name with his book. A catalyst for Doerries was the struggles of veterans who had returned home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Persuading the United States military that post-traumatic stress might be ameliorated by exposing troops to the words of classical dramatists could not have been an easy sell, though it probably helped to say that Sophocles’ plays had been written by a retired general. The stakes were high when in 2008 Doerries and his actors were at last given permission to perform scenes from Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” [409 BCE], in his own translations, for 400 Marines, some of whom had brought along their spouses. (Doerries’s renderings of these and other plays are now available in a paperback volume from Vintage.) The postproduction discussion went on for over three hours before Doerries cut things off, and his account of the responses to the trauma experienced by two soldiers who fought in the Trojan War — the suicidal Ajax and the injured and abandoned Philoctetes — makes clear why the Department of Defense soon approved a hundred additional performances.

Over time Doerries managed to recruit dozens of star performers, including Adam Driver, Paul Giamatti, Frances McDormand, David Strathairn and Jesse Eisenberg, to provide energetic table readings of key scenes — “Vocal cords were shredded. Spit flew” — that preceded and prompted the often fraught public discussions.

What began on military bases gradually spread to scores of American communities where people were hurting and theater could make a difference. Doerries’s next choice, Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound,” whose protagonist endures “extreme incarceration,” was, Doerries believed, well suited for American prisons (though wardens proved even harder to persuade of the value of such performances than the generals had been). It would lead Doerries to prisons across the land and eventually to a performance before the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay. If this chapter is less satisfying it’s probably because of the more tenuous connection between the strange and episodic play and the issue Doerries is keen to explore. I’m less sure than he that the tragedy is essentially about “discipline and power,” nor am I persuaded that the suffering of the god Prometheus, punished for giving fire to humanity, is all that similar to the experience of the thousands of convicts in America enduring solitary confinement. Doerries was on stronger ground with his next choice, Sophocles’ “The Women of Trachis” [ca. 450-425 BCE], about the assisted suicide of Heracles, where the play’s ethical dilemmas speak with greater immediacy to contemporary concerns.

It was in the aftermath of a 2011 performance of “The Women of Trachis” before an audience of mostly senior citizens in Falmouth, Mass., that it would dawn on Doerries — it’s the anagnorisis [the moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery] of his own drama — that all his work on Greek tragedy had been to one end, “surrounding myself with people who wanted to face the darkness together and tell their stories,” so that “hope can be found in tragedy.” His moment of recognition serves as a fitting climax to an impressive and accomplished journey.

THE THEATER OF WAR: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today
By Bryan Doerries
284 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

[James Shapiro teaches English at Columbia University.  His most recent book is The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

[Vintage has published three books of play texts in Bryan Doerries’s adaptations.  The ones that were released when this review was published in the New York Times were Sophocles: Philoctetes: A New Translation (12 August 2014) and All That You’ve Seen Here Is God: New Versions of Four Greek Tragedies Sophocles’ Ajax, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis; Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1 September 2015).  These two volumes were joined on 26 October 2021 by Oedipus Trilogy: New Versions of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.]

Some Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from the Archive

 

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY
by Robert Wilson
(based on Gustave Flaubert)
2004 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
21 October 2004 

My first show in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave season this year was Robert Wilson’s gospel-inspired version of The Temptation of St. Anthony on 19 October [2004].  Wilson’s piece, presented in BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, is based on a Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) novel (La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 1874) of the spiritual torment of Saint Anthony the Great (251-356), but Wilson tells his version virtually without spoken dialogue at all, having turned the story into a gospel-music revival.  

Flaubert’s novel, written in the form of a play script (and itself inspired by a ca. 1557 painting of the same title attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525-30 – 1569), details one night in the life of Saint Anthony who begins to question his years of self-imposed solitude and asceticism.  The devil tempts him with both physical pleasures—luscious food, a shower of gold, a beautiful woman (The Queen of Sheba) and man (Adonis)—and many different non-Christian beliefs and philosophies.   

(The painting referenced above as the inspiration for Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony was cited in the Wikipedia entry for the novel.  It was originally attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but has since been ascribed to one of his followers.  

(There were, however, at least two other canvases with the same title by painters in Bruegel’s family, including one painted by his younger son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1568-1625, in 1594, and another by his elder son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1564-1638, in ca. 1600.  [After 1559, Pieter the Elder dropped the h from his family name; his relatives continued to use Brueghel.] 

(The French Wikipedia page for the Flaubert attributes the inspiration to the version from Pieter Brueghel the Younger.  Unless Flaubert left something in writing to attest to his stimulus, I don’t know how scholars can be sure.)

Anthony’s desert retreat is visited by a phantasmagorical array of evil characters and visions.  He struggles, but he prevails.  Along the path, he’s questioned and challenged by his disciple, Hilarion. 

In Wilson’s more austere adaptation, gone are the wild delusions of diabolical temptations.  Many are represented by the gospel hymns (gluttony in “Table Is Spread”; lust in “God Is Love”).  The director’s spare style is punctuated by sections of vibrant dance (choreographed by Christalyn Wright) and spiritual Christian revelry.

As usual with Wilson, the piece is short on drama, but long on theatrical spectacle.  The music is glorious of course (more on this later), but the visual images Wilson evoked are stunning, whether enhanced by the movement (the movement coach is Valerie Winborne), set, or costumes (designed by Geoffrey Holder, a certified theatrical genius to be sure). 

I suppose that if you’re susceptible to being touched by the story of Saint Anthony, the hermit saint who went in search of the true faith by living alone in the Egyptian desert, the play (if that’s what you can call Wilson’s piece) may move you—but since I don’t have a dog in this race, I was taken by the spectacle alone.  Over a brief, intermissionless hour and forty minutes, that was enough sustenance.

Since the music is the center of this piece, I should say something about that up front.  In contrast to a musical I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown this summer, which was inspired by the clash of musical cultures in Texas (so the playwright/director said) but had no one working on it who had any background in Mexican, Latin, or Tejano music (or country-western, either), Wilson did this absolutely right.  [The play at CATF was The Rose of Corazon by Keith Glover.  I reported on it on Rick On Theater on 8 July 2015.]  

Wilson collaborated with Bernice Johnson Reagon, about as much an expert in gospel music as you can find.  She not only knows the music as an academic who has studied the background and origins, but she just retired from her own gospel group, Sweet Honey in the Rock.  Now, I’m not a great fan of gospel music especially, but the vocal harmonies are gorgeous, and the music—which carried all the verbal element of Temptation—is superb. 

Reagon used existing songs, some of which she adjusted to fit the Saint Anthony story, and composed some original pieces.  All of them are wonderfully executed by Wilson’s cast.  (There’s a tinge of African rhythms in some of the pieces, and some of the costumes also bear African elements, but that may be embedded in the gospel tradition.  In any case, it does nothing but enhance the performance.) 

As I indicated, there’s no real spoken dialogue—except for the songs, the only other words are recitative or chants.  It makes the whole thing seem like a church pageant.  (As you might have imagined, Wilson’s Temptation was compared some to Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus.  Gospel did, by the way, have something of a life after BAM in 1983: it was shown on PBS’s Great Performances in November 1985, which is where I saw it, and went to Broadway in 1988.  It appeared in the repertoires of several regional theaters in the years afterward, too, but it’s popularity may have faded substantially by now.)

The base set, designed and lit by Wilson, is a unit which never changes—a square room with windows on the side walls and arched alcoves in the rear, flanked by doors at right and left.  The floor is essentially bare except for thin, wooden benches parallel to the side walls, one on each side of the stage.  (As usual with Wilson, the floor lights up in various colors, and there are constant washes of light from above that change the color of the set and costumes.) 

The side walls are directly perpendicular to the proscenium so they’re all but invisible from the center of the house, and the alcoves up stage resemble nothing so much as a pair of tablets for the Ten Commandments, making the space remind me of a simple synagogue, the alcoves representing the Torah ark.  This may be Wilson’s intent—to evoke the First Temple in Jerusalem, say—or I may have been the only spectator to find this resemblance.

The set’s occasionally enhanced by movable additions as the narrative calls for them.  These, of course, are seldom realistic.  In the instance that impressed me the most, a mountain flows out and one of the deities Anthony encounters descends. 

The deity first appears as a small puppet at the top of the mountain, rounds the first peak, and disappears briefly between the parts of the mountain.  When the deity emerges around another peak, it’s a larger puppet identical to the first except for its size.  Rounding another peak and disappearing again, it emerges, this time as a live actor, dressed the same as the two puppets.  Accompanied by one of Reagon’s songs, it’s a simple, but effective and delightful effect.

Holder’s costumes are mostly brightly colored and richly decorated robes but often topped by very elaborate (and, to my eyes, African-inspired) headdresses.  The women also have highly styled (and styled high) wigs of different shapes. 

Only Saint Anthony (Carl Hancock Rux) and his student Hilarion (Helga Davis) are individually cast; the rest of the characters are played by members of the ensemble while, for the most part, the rest serve as a chorus.  (According to a note in the program, most of the members of this all-African-American cast have known and worked with each other for years.)  They often weave intricate patterns, moving around the stage as they sing.  The robes are floor length and this makes the actors look like they’re gliding on wheels rather than walking.  It’s wonderfully ethereal. 

Like I said, with Wilson, often the spectacle is all.  In this case, it was enough.  Sometimes, beauty for its own sake is sufficient.

*  *  *  *

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
by William Shakespeare
Watermill Theatre production by Propeller (London)
17 March 2004 

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night [Tuesday, 16 March 2004], in the production by Edward Hall’s all-male Propeller company from London, presented in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, the former Majestic which had been recovered for Peter Brook’s Mahabharata back in the ’80s.  I didn’t know the company previously, though they’ve been around for seven years; they’ve done other Shakespeare (Henry V), but I don’t know if they do other writers or periods [apparently not—Shakespeare is their turf]. 

For the first time that I can remember, Diana, my frequent theater partner, liked a show that I didn’t; if we disagree, it’s usually the other way around.  (She said she liked the “energy” of the performers.  That didn’t do it for me, and I didn’t question her because I didn’t want to spoil her enjoyment.) 

I guess the actors do a good enough job (especially the rude mechanicals: Tony Bell as Bottom the Weaver, Vincent Leigh as Snout the Tinker, Jonathan McGuinness as Snug the Joiner, Chris Myles as Peter Quince the Carpenter, and Jules Werner as Flute the Bellows-mender), but I just don’t see the reason to do this with all men.  It struck me as a gimmick—Hamlet on roller skates; if there’s anything more to it, it went past me. 

It’s not really Elizabethan—these actors aren’t boys, they’re men.  They don’t impersonate women, though they wear women’s clothes: there are no wigs, the actors don’t do “female” voices, or otherwise try to present feminine characters.  (Think Jamie Farr’s Klinger from MASH.  I’d add the Ballet Trocadero de Monte Carlo, but that’s a deliberate travesty; this isn’t supposed to be.) 

As far as I can tell, the casting of men in all the roles doesn’t add anything to the play except one more layer of humor—but I don’t see that that addition is appropriate.  There are essentially three kinds of humor in this production: 1) the jokes Shakespeare wrote into the play; 2) the physical comedy added by the director and actors; and 3) humor that arises because men are saying lines intended for female characters.  1) and 2) strike me as perfectly legitimate, but 3) strikes me as gratuitous. 

The laughs don’t come from the writing or the acting—just the casting.  It’s not clever; it’s just opportunistic.  And I don’t see how it illuminates the play or its themes (not that Midsummer’s themes are so deep they need much illuminating). 

In the program, director Hall is quoted as saying that the all-male casting “is about ‘trying to give the plays back to the actors, so that they can really tell the story in a more one-on-one way with the audience.’”  I can’t imagine how that statement even makes sense.  It sounds like he’s saying women actors can’t tell the story or work one-on-one with the audience (if that’s even an important accomplishment). 

The whole thing—which runs two hours and 40 minutes—just didn’t work for me at all.  I thought it was silly—not funny.  It even qualifies as pretentious, considering Hall’s statement.

*  *  *  *

THE WILD DUCK
by Henrik Ibsen
National Theatre of Norway (Oslo)
2006 Next Wave Festival (BAM)
1 November 2006 

My theater companion, Diana, and I went over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday evening, 26 October, to see the National Theatre of Norway’s production of Ibsen’s Wild Duck.  Like most non-musical productions at BAM, this was at the Harvey Theater.  I’m always curious to see how the natives interpret their own playwrights.  It always strikes me as sort of like going back to the source. 

Also, those national companies are usually excellent; I don’t believe I’ve seen the Norwegian company before, but I’ve seen the Swedish counterpart (with Bergman often at the helm), and they’re superb.

(I was telling my mother about this show and it made me recall two other national companies I’ve seen in the past decades: the State Theater of Lithuania with a play called The Square by the company’s director, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria, with a Russian play called Retro by Alexander Galin.  I didn’t know either play, of course, and both were performed in the companies’ native languages. 

(And both were magnificent performances—and experiences.  I think The Square, which was at the Joyce Theatre on 8th Avenue in Chelsea in ’91 as part of the short-lived New York International Festival of the Arts—which may have morphed into the Lincoln Center Festival, but I’m not sure—may have had simultaneous translation, but I have always remembered that play as a fascinating and, at the time, unique take on the shift from communism/totalitarianism to freedom/democracy.  Fifteen years later, and I still remember it. 

(Retro, which was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86 [see my report on this international theater festival, 10 November 2014], didn’t have a translation—just a synopsis in the program—but the acting was so absolutely clear that that was all I needed to decipher what was happening.  The company worked in almost perfect Stanislavsky style for this domestic comedy and every action and intent was entirely clear and comprehensible even though I couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. 

(Comedies, I think, are the hardest plays to communicate when you don’t understand the language.  A tape of that performance would have been a perfect training film for Stanislavsky acting.  I guess that my remembering these performances 15 and 20 years afterwards says something.)

The Wild Duck isn’t one of Ibsen’s well-known, frequently-staged plays—at least, not in the U.S.; it’s apparently popular and even beloved in Norway—so I’ll give a short synopsis of the plot:

Hjalmar Ekdal (Gard Eidsvold) is a photographer, but he lets his wife, Gina (Agot Sendstad), and daughter, Hedvig (Birgitte Larsen), run his studio while he devotes his time to loftier pursuits: supposedly working on a “great invention,” which he never identifies.  He spends most of his time hunting rabbits in the loft with his elderly father (Kai Remlov)—who’d been imprisoned for corruption and suffers from moral and financial bankruptcy. 

The Ekdals only get by thanks to the wealthy Haaken Werle (Bjorn Skagestad)—Old Ekdal’s former business partner who’d managed to escape the charges that had condemned Old Ekdal.  Without Hjalmar knowing it, Werle has been giving money to Gina. 

One day, Gregers Werle (Eindride Eidsvold), Haaken’s son and Hjalmar’s oldest friend, returns to his hometown following a self-imposed exile.  In his search for the truth about the two families, Gregers makes discoveries that jeopardize the happiness of the entire family and have tragic consequences.

This Wild Duck, an offering of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival, is a kind of trimmed-down version—not an adaptation, but it only runs two hours (without intermission) and the cast has been cut to just the nine most prominent characters.  The set reflects this slimming process as well: there are only a table and about ten chairs (all Scandinavian-modern design—very stark) and an odd wood-textured wall, about six feet tall, across the back of the space. 

Director Eirik Stubø moved the action up to the late ’50s or early ’60s—at one point Ekdal plays Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” on his flute and spins Gina around as he sings a few bars—though the text isn’t altered as far as I could tell from the supertitles.  (The translation for the titles is credited to Judith Messick and Katherine Hanson, but it looks a lot like the Rolf Fjelde rendition published by Signet that I own.  I looked up a couple of things after I got home, and the wording looks awfully close; I even spotted several exact phrases as I skimmed for what I was looking for.)

It’s an entirely minor quibble, I admit, but the juxtaposition of the 19th-century text (Wild Duck was written in 1884) and the mid-20th-century look is occasionally jarring.  Two instances that I noted in passing include an exchange between Hjalmar Ekdal and his wife regarding cutting the pages of some of his reference books and a mention of “freshly-churned butter.”  Unless Norway was way behind the rest of the Western world in the ’50s and ’60s, we pretty much stopped selling books with uncut pages and getting butter fresh from a churn, as opposed to a grocery store’s fridge, was relegated to farms. 

More of a problem for me is the total ambiguity of the setting—and especially that back wall.  The script says the first act is in the Werle house, and the other four acts are in Ekdal’s photography studio.  In the published translation, the studio is described as completely furnished, not spartan, so Stubø (and his designer Kari Gravklev) are making a stylistic decision beyond the period of the action—to make a Symbolically minimalist environment for the (essentially) Realistic acting.  I can only say that I had a hard time imagining where the people are in real space—and maybe that’s my failing. 

I don’t think it’s my failing, however, that I was bothered by the constant need for the cast to reset the table and chairs, including moving the table on and off stage and adding or subtracting chairs.  (There are only three chairs and no table when we first arrive at Ekdal’s house in act two.  There are no act breaks, except that needed to reset the stage—accomplished by the actors themselves with the lights up.) 

There’s also a lot of action devoted to setting and adjusting the table (which has extension leaves, stored under the table top, that are taken out and put in as the needs of the scene demand).  I remember seeing a production of The Duchess of Malfi (by Cheek by Jowl) at BAM in 1995, and it became a play about moving chairs.  (There was a staging of The Brothers Karamazov—not the acrobatic clowns—at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in 1994 that devolved into the same thing.)  This production almost becomes a play about moving the table!

Now, that wall.  It’s just a plain, blondish wood-pattern expanse that extends from stage right to stage left, about six feet high—just over head height.  It looks to be about six to eight inches wide—wide enough for Hedvig to walk or crawl along.  But, what the hell is it?  I mean, we know that the studio is indoors—it’s described in the text as a loft, suggesting that it’s above ground level.  (I always pictured it as a sort of attic space, in fact.) 

Except for the fact that this looks like wood, it otherwise seems like a garden wall of some kind, and seems, from the action, to separate the “indoor” area (that is, the studio) from the “outdoor” area (where the rabbits Old Ekdal shoots and the wild duck of the title live).  There are no door and no windows in the wall, so when someone goes into the area on the other side (which we can’t see), he climbs over, often using a tall, wooden step ladder he brings from off stage. 

When people look over the wall, they usually climb on chairs (which are either already placed against the wall on “our” side or are moved into position for the purpose of peering over the wall’s top.  As I said, Hedvig walks along the top of the wall once and crawls along it another time.  I’m sorry, but if all this is symbolic, I didn’t get it.  (I cop to not being good with Symbolism.  I guess I’m just too literal-minded.) 

If it isn’t symbolic, I can’t figure out how that wall works (along, of course, with the rest of the space).  I’m going on about this because it occupied my focus so much of the time I was watching, trying to understand what I was looking at, that it became a distraction.  (And, believe me, what with having to look up at the supertitles and then back down at the actors, an additional distraction is totally unnecessary!)   

I’m not sure I can articulate this, but using the chairs that way and carrying an actual ladder from off stage seems to make the wall real—it’s an actual wall.  But, then, what’s it doing there?  What kind of space has a tall wooden wall with no doors or windows like that?  If it’s a garden wall, it wouldn’t be wood (unlike, say, a fence).  If it’s a room wall, it’d have windows or doors. 

But if it’s symbolic, not “real,” it seems you shouldn’t have to use real, practical things to negotiate it.  Does that make sense?  Maybe I’m way off—as I said, I’m not good with Symbolism.  If I were designing a symbolic wall, I’d have made it low enough to look over without aids, or I’d make it a scrim or a latticework painted like a wall; I’m sure someone more imaginative than I, especially in stage design, would come up with more and better ideas.  The problem I see with most of my ideas is that if the director of Wild Duck deliberately wanted the area on the other side of the wall to be invisible to the audience, these wouldn’t work.

I’ve said on several occasions that I find trying to turn Ibsen’s Realistic plays into some other style, Symbolism among them, is a usually disastrous directorial decision.  I allow that Wild Duck is partway to Ibsen’s more Symbolistic period at the end of his career—according to director Stubø’s program note, Ibsen wrote his publisher: “This new play has in certain ways its own place in my dramatic production; its dramatic progress is in many ways different from my previous ones”—but it’s not there yet.  Maybe I am too literal minded to buy such a shift.  Maybe I only think it doesn’t work—but in reality, I just don’t like it.  I don’t think that’s the case, but would I know? 

It’s not that I mind a minimalist set, a suggested set without all the 19th-century trappings.  I did that myself in an adaptation of a Chekhov story—and I believe it worked.  I don’t even mind up-dating the look of a play; I did that, too, with an Oscar Wilde play I reset in the 1920s.  But when the director moves into an alien style, then I think the balance gets tipped.  Finally, if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then almost nothing else really matters—it’s just not working.  In my humble opinion, of course.

The acting all seemed fine, except that it was all on a rather even keel for the most part.  There are a few highs and lows—and some long silences while the cast takes care of tasks like setting that table and putting in or taking out leaves (I joked that maybe Stubø is trying to rip off Pinter, but it’s not much of a corollary.) 

I mean, Ibsen’s plays lean toward melodrama by today’s standards—there’s lots of emotion and psychological drama.  These folks are all moderated and even-tempered an awful lot of the time.  Now, maybe that’s a Norwegian character trait, I don’t know, but it struck me as odd, given the circumstances. 

The casting of Hedvig was also a little peculiar.  Ibsen says she’s 14—Juliet’s age—but the actress in this production, Birgitte Larsen, plays in her later teens (and, I’m sure, the actress is actually older than that [it turns out she was 25]).  She’s much more precociously sexual than I figure Hedvig is intended to be, though I’m not convinced Larsen is playing it that way.  She just looks more like a woman than a girl. 

Diana thought she was and that the others actors, especially the men (and her father in particular), were responding.  (Diana felt that Stubø might have been suggesting the daughter is starting to take after her mother.  That might not even be contrary to Ibsen’s creed, which held that the moral corruption of the parent is inherited by the children.  That’s why Nora couldn’t stay with her children or take them with her in Doll House.)  I didn’t get that impression, however—though perhaps I just missed it.

Finally, I’ve decided I don’t like supertitles.  I’ve had a series of bad experiences with this translation device—they’re badly located on the stage so that I can’t read them and watch the actors or they’re too small or distant so I just plain can’t read them.  In this instance, the screen isn’t too high above the actors, and it isn’t too small, but I found myself bobbing my head up and down so much and trying to catch the longer phrases fast enough to get back to the stage before the next text is projected that I was losing far too much of the theater for the logistics. 

When BAM used the infrared earphones, I used to keep the volume down low so I could just hear the translators and still hear the actors’ actual speech, even if I couldn’t understand it.  I didn’t have to bop back and forth between a text and the action—I didn’t have to choose where to look at a given moment—and I didn’t have to worry about reading a line or two of text instead of listening and watching. 

I’m sure paying live translators every night, maintaining the transmission system, and keeping track of those earphones was both more cumbersome and more costly than the projection system, but it was a lot easier on me.

I guess I have to come down on the side of disappointed with this experience.  It isn’t bad—say, like Nora, the German up-date of Doll House a few seasons back at BAM [see my report on ROT, 18 June 2016]—but I didn’t really enjoy it or get much out of it.  It certainly didn’t reveal anything new about Ibsen or the play for me.  Charles Isherwood had a pretty decent review (a “stark but perceptive production”) in the New York Times on Friday, 27 October, the day after we saw the show, but I can’t say I saw the benefits he did.  

Some Classics from the Archives

PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Abbey Players

September 1990

Seeing the Abbey Players perform John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is akin to watching the Moscow Art Theatre do Chekhov or the Berliner Ensemble do Brecht.  It just seems to be part of them: they aren’t so much acting as remembering and reliving a collective heritage.  Historically, of course, this is so.  Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, dubbed the National Theatre of Ireland, premiered Playboy in 1907, and has continued to present Synge’s works, along with those of other Irish authors, ever since.  This material does belong to them, and they cherish it, as the performance at the Eisenhower Theatre of Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts demonstrates.

The story of Synge’s most famous play is simple enough.  Young Christy Mahon stumbles into the tavern of Michael James Flaherty (the set is by Noel Sheridan) and confesses that he is running from the “polis” because he has mur-dered his father.  After the townsfolk, particularly the young girls, make a hero of him, Old Mahon turns up, alive but with a crack in his skull, and the villagers turn on Christy.  There are half a dozen interpretations of the play’s meaning, including seeing Christy as a Christ figure, a Don Quixote, or a new Ireland rising up against its old masters, England and the Catholic Church.  Synge (1871-1909) has never given credence to any of these, saying, “I follow Goethe’s rule, to tell no one what one means in one’s writings.”  He did say that he “wrote the play because it pleased me,” and that it was “made to amuse” his audience.  The current Abbey production, directed by Vincent Dowling on a small but evocative set by Noel Sheridan, does this with a vengeance.

All the performances are praiseworthy, each actor finding the little idiosyncrasies and character traits that make even the briefest appearances alive and integral to the life on stage.  At the center of the production are Frank McCusker as Christy and Roma Downey as Pegeen Mike.  Downey is simultaneously romantic and strong, a dreamer who despises the weak, sniveling suitor, Shawn Keogh (Macdara O Fatharta) picked for her by her father (John Cowley).  She has a sweet face that turns a pout into an irresistible magnet, but she can set her jaw and mount a steely glare that cows the whole village.  It’s no wonder, in this production, that it is Pegeen Mike of all the fawning village lasses who attracts Christy.  McCusker’s would-be parricide is a boy-man: tall, blond and lanky with a baby face that seems most often to be gape-mouthed whenever he isn’t talking.  McCusker can effect both the blank gaze of utter incomprehension and the wide-eyed stare of childlike wonder. 

Among the wonderful character roles with which Synge populated his County Mayo village, cowardly Shawn Keogh stumbles and trips over his own feet in O Fatharta’s round-eyed performance and the Widow Quin is both sly and openly lustful as portrayed by Nuala Hayes.  Singling these players out should not, however, suggest that this company is anything less than a perfectly integrated ensemble. 

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In the end, it is neither the plot nor the characters which makes the Abbey’s Playboy a special theatrical experience.  It is Synge’s language in the mouths of actors for whom it is like a mother tongue.  Oscar Wilde, an expatriate Irish writer, once said, “The English took our land and left it desolate.  But we took their language and gave it a new beauty.”  Synge, who immersed himself in the study of the language of Irish peasants, has written what is arguably among the most beautiful prose poetry in English literature.  It was written to be spoken, and here it is spoken—almost sung—by people who know and love it.  Listening intensely, you could easily get lost in the thick brogues and unfamiliar vocabulary (the program includes a glossary), but by allowing the prose to flow over you, you can enjoy both the lyric beauty of the sounds the words make and the sense they convey.  The apparent effortlessness of the verbal performances enhances the enjoyment.

The Abbey has not made a tour of the U.S. in 55 years.  In case it takes another half-century for them to come back, which Heaven forbid, you would be doing yourself a favor to try to catch it on its current tour, arranged by American Theatre Productions, Inc.  After closing in Washington on 21 October, the production moves on to one- and two-night stands across the mid-west, with stops in the southwest and south, then closes in Toronto in late November.  (There is a tentative plan to add a Boston stop before returning to Dublin, but no play dates have been set.)

*  *  *  *

TWELFTH NIGHT & UNCLE VANYA

Donmar Warehouse

22 & 30 Jan. 2003

The first thing about Donmar Warehouse’s Twelfth Night (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre) is that it’s not terribly funny most of the time.  (I’d say that’s a problem.)  To begin with, Sam Mendes has paced it very deliberately, as if it were a drama.  Aside from the obvious, this also accentuates the consequences of the Malvolio plot (which has always presented a problem for me anyway), making it more portentous and horrific than it otherwise is played.  Everything else is played so soberly (Ben Brantley in the New York Times refers to the style superseding the content, and I interpret that to mean this effect) that there is little mirth, even among the buffoons.  The songs Feste sings are all also melancholy, even the drinking song with the two Sirs.  I was never under the impression, even given the Malvolio subplot, that William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601-02) is a dark comedy.

Brantley mentions the ill-conceived picture fame, which is practically the only set piece on the stage.  (There are a few other occasional pieces of furniture—tables, chairs, a couch—but the rest of the set is the twinkling lights he mentions—upstage, forming a background of stars or, as I interpreted them, the lights of the rest of the town as seen from the two chateaux.  The sets are by Anthony Ward and the lighting design is by Hugh Vanstone, recreated for BAM by David Holmes.) 

This huge frame, center stage and silver-gray, becomes an unavoidable focus of the performance, and it was entirely confusing as to what Mendes means when a character appears inside it.  All the characters—except possibly Orsino, but I’m not sure—stand in the frame at one time or another.  Sometimes they face outward, like a portrait hanging in one of the living rooms (that’s what I thought it might be at first, but that doesn’t hold up), and sometimes they have their backs to us.  (Diana, my frequent theater companion, thought Mendes might have been trying to say something about mistaken identity, which isn’t far from Brantley’s idea that it was about the way others saw the various characters.  I had no idea what to make of it.  And that was a problem of its own—I kept trying to figure it out, distracting me from what was happening on stage.)  In any case, the device doesn’t work and adds only confusion to the production—exacerbated by the fact that it’s so prominent.

In the end, it was an interesting production without being good.  If Much Ado is my favorite Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night is my second favorite comedy, and this wasn’t really enjoyable—just curious.  Diana thought it was a case of wanting to do Hamlet on rollerskates, but I suspect Mendes, who ought to be too good for that kind of conceit, had something more portentous in mind—and it just doesn’t work.

By the way, Brantley spends a lot of his review praising Simon Russell Beale, the actor who plays Malvolio (and also plays Vanya).  I can’t argue that he’s not a good actor—even an excellent one—but I think Mendes steered him in an ill-chosen direction here.  Until he’s imprisoned and tormented at the end of the play, Malvolio ought to be a legitimate figure of ridicule; this Malvolio is unpleasant, a prig and a martinet—but not funny.  It’s of a piece with the whole production. 

———

Well, the Donmar’s Uncle Vanya is an interesting experience to try to describe—or evaluate, I guess.  All the parts of the performance of the classic play (1899-1900) by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) were good, even excellent.  The acting was superb, and the physical production was nicely conceived.  Even the music (live) worked nicely with the show.  Brian Friel’s translation is very good—contemporary without being anachronistic—and nicely poetic.  What was the problem, then?  Like Twelfth Night, it was slowly paced and deliberate, but that didn’t seem wrong in this case—even if the show went for three hours.  I can only say that Mendes fell into the Vanya trap.  The play’s about boredom; a play about boredom can’t end up being boring.  In spite of all the good elements that made up the production, it added up to a lassitude that was self-defeating.  I don’t know how else to explain it.  What’s more, I don’t think I’d know how to fix it, either.  The shame here is that the work is so good in all other respects.  The acting really is an object lesson in 19th-century Realism and the casting is superb: everyone just made their roles fit like gloves.  I can’t say it was too slow—like the Twelfth Night, which I thought was—but I don’t know what made it work so unsatisfyingly in the end.  I feel inadequate because I can’t diagnose the problem; I feel like I should be able to.  (I suppose it’s proof that a theater production is more than the sum of its parts.)

*  *  *  *

GHOSTS

Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden

11 June 2003

Before I report on Ingmar Bergman’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at BAM’S Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, let me tell you a few things about his translation and adaptation.  First, this staging is based on Bergman’s own translation, not some existing text.  Second, he amended it—with some scenes from two Strindberg plays and one scene he wrote himself.  (I wasn’t as familiar with the text as I thought; I didn’t recognize for sure which scenes weren’t Ghosts.)  The program note, at least the part that I got to read before the show started, didn’t say if Bergman also cut some of Ibsen’s text to accommodate the additions.  The play ran 2½ hours, but that only seems right—even short, perhaps—for an Ibsen; that suggests he might have cut some to allow for his inserts.

Third, he has clearly sexed up the play some.  Oswald (Jonas Malmsjö) and Regine (Angela Kovács) are pretty randy: he runs after her relentlessly, feels her up and down and jumps on her, usually between her legs, at every opportunity.  Manders (Jan Malmsjö) and Mrs. Alving  (Pernilla August) aren’t exactly passionate on stage, except for one Hollywood kiss that’s far from paternal, but it’s clear from the text that she did try to entice him to take her into his home—and, presumably, his bed—when she briefly leaves Alving after his fling with Regina’s mother.  They are also clearly closer friends from years past than most conventional productions indicate: she calls him Gabriel (I didn’t even know he had a first name), and Oswald calls him Uncle Gabriel.  Finally, it’s not sexual, but in the end, Oswald strips off his clothes in the throes of a syphilitic attack and rolls around the stage nude before his mother.  It’s not a sexual moment, but it’s decidedly un-Victorian, even, I suspect, for Scandinavians—either Norwegian or Swedish.  Oh, and Bergman’s text had a lot of vulgarity I know Ibsen (1828-1906) never used; one character even yelled “Fuck you” at Mrs. Alving (though I don’t know what she said in Swedish, of course).

I make these observations because, as you might have expected, I had Leo Shapiro’s production on my mind [see my report “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975,” 6 September 2014) and the contretemps he had with the New York Times’ Walter Kerr and other critics who accused him of “messing around with Ibsen,” as one review headline put it.  The sexiness was castigated pointedly, though Shapiro didn’t change the text (he used a Rolf Fjelde translation).  Now, I suppose an argument can be made that a “great artist” like Bergman can “mess around” with Ghosts, but an upstart like Shapiro has no business doing it.  I won’t buy it, but you could argue it.  And Bergman has the temerity to fool with Ibsen’s text adding in Strindberg—whom Ibsen didn’t much like, I don’t believe—and words of his own.  Now, that’s arrogant.  (The word “bowdlerize” comes to mind—derived from the name of Dr. Thomas Bowdler who “improved” Shakespeare in the early 19th century by expurgating “offensive” bits.  I’m also reminded of a German practice of the 19th and early 20th century in which works like Shakespeare’s were published in versions verbessert—that is, “improved”—by an editor.)  Now, I’m not offended by Bergman’s having done this—just by the opprobrium heaped on Shapiro for doing much less.  It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Now, as for the production itself: it was a disappointment.  Once again, the acting was terrific, but the actors were subverted by one choice Bergman made that seemed ill-advised.  His main set, designed by Gören Wassberg, is a revolve, with three playing areas wedged into it.  (There’s a little area on stage right, with an upholstered chair and an end table, which is used in conjunction with some of the revolving areas when appropriate, and Mrs. Alving is seated there, quietly, in the first scene when Regina and her father have a scene down center.  Now, the problem with this set-up is that, except for one open playing area, the set pieces restrict the actors to a tiny little space at the front of the turntable (plus a little platform in front of that).  There’s no room to do any movements, and Ghosts is a talky play with little innate action. 

The first act, which took place mostly on or in front of a sofa (area “one,” if you like) and around or in front of a small table (area “two”), was virtually enervating; act two was a little more active—Bergman used area “three” more—an open floor bordered on each side by a small bench and chair, and there were more three- and even four-character scenes.  But it was still essentially a static production.  As my companion, Diana, pointed out, we felt little of the emotion that the characters seemed to be feeling on stage—it was remote and cold for all the realism of the acting.  I blame the staging for most of this.  It is, however, exacerbated by having to listen through earphones, which makes the dialogue flat, but also very prominent—it’s right in your ear.  (In past experiences with translations, the devices haven’t caused this sensation by themselves, so I attribute the effect to the production, but increased by the earphones.)

(I was thinking of Bertolt Brecht, of course.  Alienation works in Brecht’s own stuff and others’, but I don’t think it works in Ibsen.  I think Ibsen intended us to feel along with the characters, to identify with them.  That’s precisely what Brecht didn’t want—identification.  I saw a production of Ghosts at Arena in D.C. in 1997, directed by Liviu Ciulei, in which he tried to turn the play into a Symbolist drama—stuff was hanging from the ceilings.  It doesn’t work—Ibsen’s not a Symbolist, he’s a Realist.  I don’t think you can make those kinds of wholesale shifts in major style without either damaging the play or doing some heavy rewriting/reconceiving.  Turning Ibsen into Brecht is the same thing.  Not all plays are as flexible as the Greeks and Shakespeare—even great classics.  What Shapiro did, from what I can tell, is heighten the Realism in a sense.  I don’t think Shapiro violated Ibsen’s spirit; he took it the next few steps along the continuum.  I’m not sure that’s what Bergman did.  Ciulei certainly didn’t.)

Bergman was also obviously doing something with the color scheme, but I haven’t figured that out yet.  The whole set was green—the carpet, the drapes, the upholstery, the table cloth, the column and sculpture in the background, the lampshades—and the characters seemed to be wearing symbolically-colored costumes designed by Anna Bergman.  The Alvings were in gray—for ghosts, I’d guess.  Oswald even had what appeared to be grayish make-up—for his illness, to be sure, but also ghostly.  Regina’s father (Örjan Ramberg) was in brown, the color of earth, and I interpret that as an indication of his basic goodness and honesty, at least in contrast to the other characters who are all duplicitous and corrupt one way or another (either by their actions or by heredity).  Regine is in various shades of red (though not scarlet), which I take to be an indication of her lustiness and slight shamelessness—but this isn’t at all a secure interpretation because it doesn’t entirely fit.  The one I don’t get at all, not even remotely, is Manders, who’s all in purple (even his hat and shoes!).  Now, purple is the color of royalty or nobility, richness, or passion—none of which fit Manders at all.  But the colors are so clearly selected for a purpose other than just decoration, and purple is certainly not a common color for any man, especially a pastor (he’s not a monsignor or bishop—it’s the wrong denomination; besides it’s a suit, not a clerical robe). 

Still, as I said, Bergman is always provocative, even when he doesn’t work.  I didn’t think the production worked on its own level, but seeing Bergman try to say something of his own through the play was worth it.  I’ll be interested to see what the reviews say.  They may be in today’s papers, since this was opening and the show only plays through the 14th.  (And it was sold out—people were out front looking for spare tickets.  On the other hand, some people left at intermission.)

I didn’t see Shapiro’s Ghosts in ’75—I had only just gotten here and didn’t know what was happening around yet, and I was in grad school at Rutgers in those days, often 10-15 hours a day—but from what I’ve read and seen in photos, whatever liberties he may have taken with the spirit of 19th-century Norway, it was more exciting as theater than Bergman’s take.  And Shapiro, too, was working on something concrete: it wasn’t “Hamlet on roller-skates,” as it were.  (To be fair, of course, not all the critics lambasted Shapiro’s show—but the ones who did were the big names.)

———

The New York Times review of Bergman’s Ghosts was in Thursday’s paper, 12 June.  Aside from anything else, it says that this is supposed to be Bergman’s last stage production.  Ben Brantley’s never really said how he felt about the production.  I mean, it’s fairly obvious, I guess, that he liked it for the most part, but he didn’t actually say so. 

*  *  *  *

THE TAMER TAMED

Royal Shakespeare Company

13 January 2004

While I was in Washington for the holidays last year, I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater of The Tamer Tamed (first published in 1647, but written perhaps between 1609 and 1622), a sequel to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew by John Fletcher (1579-1625).  (Think Lysistrata meets Shrew.  Except that it’s awful.)  There’s a word often used to describe bad theater, and it is very apt for Tamer Tamed: leaden.  It just lay there lifeless.  The RSC tried so hard to animate it—the reviews all focused on the performances—that they ended up looking just manic, as if they were trying desperately to bring a dead body back to life.  There’s not a single line of poetry or even memorable prose; not one attractive, or even sympathetic, character; and a one-joke plot (the women are all denying the men sex) that reduces everyone to a cipher.  I couldn’t even keep most of the characters straight—but that was mostly because I didn’t really care.  Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even clever.  I repeat a caveat I’ve used numerous times: often an unknown or neglected play is unknown and neglected because it’s bad!!!  Why RSC decided to dredge this one up is a mystery to me. 

*  *  *  *

IMAGINARY INVALID

Comédie-Française

14 June 2004

Well, I’m batting 1.000!  Even the Comédie-Française was a disappointment.  Can ya beat that?  (And, then, why would you want to?)

There was a short article in the “Arts & Leisure” section on 6 June (“An Intricate Malady From the House of Molière”) that pointed out that the company is broadening its base by doing some contemporary stuff and using outside directors.  This guy, Claude Stratz, is Swiss German and it’s his first encounter with both the Comédie-Française and Molière.  This may have turned out to be a mistake—the latter more than the former, perhaps.  I’m not sure what he was up to, exactly, but whatever it was it didn’t really work.

I can’t really say that the play wasn’t funny because I don’t know if it was or not.  (I’ll try to explain this in a mo.)  I don’t know Imaginary Invalid (1673) by heart or anything, but I do know Molière some.  My French isn’t good enough to comprehend the 17th-century poetry without a trot—and the Brooklyn Academy of Music did provide supertitles at the Harvey, but even that was a problem for me—but I can get the gist of what’s going on what with my familiarity with the play and all.  I may have tittered once or twice, but more from a line than anything someone did on stage.

I had two problems even seeing/watching what was going on on stage, as a matter of fact.  First, those supertitles: they’re so high above the stage floor that it’s impossible to read them and watch the stage at the same time.  You have to choose between watching the actors and trying to understand the French, or reading the translation but missing all the action.  (And the supertitles went by pretty fast—I have the impression, too, that the actors spoke fast as well—so trying to glance up and then down doesn’t work at all.  That only ends up being like watching a flick that’s missing some frames while listening to a soundtrack with gaps in it—and the gaps don’t match!  Sometimes—often—I felt like I might as well have stayed home and read the script.  I think I would have preferred either headphone translation, even though that means you can’t hear the actual actors very well, or side titles (which some operas use now instead of overhead supertitles).  Either case would have at least meant I could have kept my eyes on the stage.  

The other problem with seeing the action on stage was that the director had lit the play so dimly (by Jean-Phillippe Roy) that I really couldn’t see very well even when I was watching the actors.  The lighting scheme seemed to be that Argan keeps his house unlit and the only light there is filters through the curtained windows.  Aside from making everything hard to see, this also gives the play a somber feeling more conducive to Macbeth or something Gothic than a Molière farce.  There were, in fact, no colors on the set and few in the costumes (Argan’s wife wears a blood-red dress), either—everything was subdued and grim.  (Both set and costumes were designed by Ezio Toffolutti.)  Umm—comedy anyone?  Ever heard of it?  (I hate to get ethnic here, but maybe asking a German to direct a comedy isn’t such a hot idea.  Name me a German stage comedy, or even a Swiss German one.)

Margo Jefferson in the Times on 11 June said that what was missing was “lightness.”  (I don’t think she had the illumination in mind, however.  But she gets megapoints for having written the only review I ever remember reading that quotes Italo Calvino!  Very erudite.  [See my post “Calvino Is To The Mind What Exercise Is To The Body,” 14 and 17 March 2016.]  I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that when I read the review, and I still don’t after seeing the play, but something was certainly amiss.  I don’t know if the cast was too earnest, or if they were trying to play Realism, or if they were just going too fast to have any fun.  (I don’t mean to place all the blame on the actors—surely it was the director who conceived all this, whatever it was.)  I might have been able to analyze the problem(s) better if I had been able to watch (and see, for God’s sake) what was going on on the stage consistently, but I have already explained why I had trouble doing that.  Even while I was watching (ahem), I kept wondering why I wasn’t enjoying this—what was going wrong.  (The very fact that I was busy wondering this while the play was going on is telling, I think.)  I still haven’t figured it out—maybe because I just didn’t see it—literally.

I hate to stress the non-performance problems, like lighting and supertitles, but I have another complaint that I think contributed to—or exacerbated—the trouble with this show.  It was a full two hours long, but it had no intermission.  It wasn’t a matter of attention span, but of fanny fatigue.  (BAM’s seats, at least at the Harvey, are less than plush.)  And sitting for two straight hours is enervating, even if there are no other problems.  I always figure a 90-minute stretch is about as long as an audience ought to go without an intermission.  (As a result of this three-act marathon—at least as far as I could tell, this was the cause—people started leaving the auditorium about two-thirds of the way through the show.  I don’t know if they left the theater or just had to hit the john and then found seats near the entrances so they didn’t have to pass in front of the rest of us again, or what, but about a dozen or so spectators started moving out from different parts of the theater at about the same time.)

You shouldn’t assume from this that everyone sat stone-faced.  Many in the audience seemed to enjoy the performance, and it was probably too large a number for them all to have been Francophones.  Language, by the way, should not have been a barrier for me.  I have seen many shows in languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi (the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them immensely.  Indeed, a Lithuanian play I saw some years ago, The Square by Eimuntas Nekrosius (produced by the State Theater of Lithuania in Vilnius)  was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression.  Obviously, if there weren’t also something else important missing from Invalid at BAM, the language/translation thing wouldn’t have been a problem, would it?  It loomed larger than it really was, I’m sure, because the production was so lacking. 

I still don’t know what wasn’t working—I can’t pinpoint it, and that bothers me.  Hell, I’ve seen English-language productions that I haven’t understood at all, so language isn’t always the big impediment, is it?  That Bulgarian play, Retro, a comedy (by Russian playwright Alexander Galin presented by the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Sofia) that was part of the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in ’86, had no translation or supertitles (which weren’t yet common), but I “understood” everything that was going on because the acting, which was classic—and superb—Stanislavsky Realism, was so good and clear that the words were virtually unnecessary.  [I think I mentioned this experience in my report “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.]  I can’t remember now if the Marathi performance I saw at TON, Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (Theatre Academy of Pune), had a translation other than the synopsis in the program (which the Bulgarian play also had) but I followed that, too.  (I seem to recall that none of the Theatre of Nations performances had translations—the organizers decided that the technology was too complex for the many venues, a number of which were either outdoors or in non-traditional theater spaces.  In any case, I don’t recall having had any problems with comprehension at all.  But, then, I could see those shows!)