Theatre Review: August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, Classic Stage Company, NYC

A couple, Edgar and Alice, approach their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in a marriage based on mutual hatred and co-dependency in August Strindberg’s bleak 1900 play, The Dance of Death.

Physically and socially isolated (they live on a secluded island and dislike their neighbours, Edgar’s colleagues in the Swedish military), the monotony of their constant bickering is broken by the arrival of a figure from their pasts—Alice’s cousin Kurt.

Soon one dysfunctional relationship becomes three as the trio’s jibes grow crueller and the stakes for all higher.

Richard Topol, Cassie Beck and Christopher Innver in the CSC's production

The Classic Stage Company’s production makes use of Strindberg’s first version of the play, with Cassie Beck as Alice, Christopher Innver as Kurt and Richard Topol as Edgar. The staging is in the round, with just enough props to suggest the period setting. But the subject matter feels modern—Kurt’s child custody issues are relatable and the married pair is reminiscent of many unhappy couples today.

Memorable moments include Alice’s sporadic playing on the piano—mimed here, with the music coming from offstage, a ghostly and strangely fitting, if practical, choice—and her husband’s sabre dance (the dance of the title, since his wife hopes more than once that the exercise will cause him to have a heart attack). It’s hard not to think of Strindberg’s rival Henrik Ibsen and Nora’s desperate tarantella in The Doll’s House (1879) as Topol veers about the stage, kicking the air.

The three actors do a good job sustaining energy in a tense and emotionally taxing performance, although Beck arguably has a less sympathetic character to work with than the men. I left feeling dramatic satisfaction at the cyclical conclusion of the play, relief at escaping the claustrophobic home of the central pair and fear at the confining nature of marriage—all very Strinbergian.

Do you know of any other plays the Secret Victorianist should review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: The Father, August Strindberg, Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn, New York

Two weeks ago, I reviewed director Jeffery Horowitz’s production of Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Last week, I saw the same company and creative team bring to life August Strindberg’s 1887 The Father.

Maggie Lacey and John Douglas Thompson in The Father

The two plays share many themes and, in some ways, parallel casts of characters so the decision to stage the contemporary (and rival) playwrights’ pieces in such a complementary way is an understandable one.

Here it is the father of the house, the Captain (John Douglas Thompson), whose behaviour is increasingly erratic, mirroring that of Nora in the earlier play. He’s driven mad by the uncertainty of paternity and manipulated by his wife Laura (Maggie Lacey) who sets up an unrelenting campaign against him to win control of their daughter Bertha, baulking at the unfairness of nineteenth-century marriage laws.

John Douglas Thompson in The Father

As with A Doll’s House, the ending is twisted in this production. Bertha’s cry of ‘mother’ is an accusatory one, shifting our focus again to how the remaining parent (here the mother) can remedy the loss of the other (a more modern consideration than those Strindberg and Ibsen were tackling).

Initially the inferior position of women is much more obvious than in A Doll’s House. A philandering soldier, Nordstrom (Christian J. Mallen), refuses to admit his responsibility for a servant girl’s pregnancy in a scene that firmly establishes the sexual double standard. But in this production it was hard to sympathise with the lack of options attendant on Laura’s plight. Thompson’s Captain is a little too weak too quickly and his madness seems over-egged. We’re left doubting how necessary it is that she push him over the edge.

Laurie Kennedy in The Father

Laurie Kennedy does a great job as Margaret, the Captain’s aged childhood nurse, and generally this feels like much more of an ensemble piece than its sister production.

After watching both plays, the overall message of these productions, for me, though remains confused. Apart from feeling sorry for the children what do we take from plays that apply twenty-first century issues to a nineteenth-century setting? Are the genders still at war or are we meant to conclude that being a father is the much less enviable position?

The Father is on at TFANA in Brooklyn until June 12. You can purchase tickets here.

Are there any other NYC productions you’d like to see the Secret Victorianist review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen, Bottoms Dream, Theater 54, New York City

The first time I saw Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 Hedda Gabler on stage was at the Old Vic in London in 2012. And it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast than between that traditionally staged and sumptuously costumed period production and Bottoms Dream’s studio performance, which I attended at Theater 54 in New York the other week.

This Hedda Gabler (adapted by Caitlin White) is stripped down, with only four characters, and performed in an intimate space with the audience surrounding the performers. Sara Fay George, as Hedda, spends much of the play writhing around the floor between scenes, playing with a pistol and acting out the drama unfolding in her subconscious. The subtleties of Ibsen give way to overt commentary on the lack of options open to the two women, Hedda and Thea (White), which is difficult since the costuming (by Mary Rubi) suggests a later, mid-twentieth-century setting.

The actors also seem inconsistent in their approach, as if there are some who do think they’re performing in a naturalistic production. Doug Durlcacher as George plays the role of the clueless husband quite predictably but comes into his own in the final scene as he and Thea reconstruct Eilert’s lost manuscript. Nat Angstrom meanwhile does a good job in capturing the character’s charisma.

Director Kevin Hollenbeck has chosen to put this Hedda Gabler in conversation with another perennial nineteenth-century favourite—August Strindberg’s 1888 Creditors (you can read my review of another NYC production of Creditors here). In this case, the two plays are performed back to back.

I only joined for the Ibsen play, but it’s easy to see the parallels two. Strindberg actually accused Ibsen of plagiarism in 1891, saying ‘Hedda Gabler is a bastard of Laura in The Father and Tekla in Creditors’. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might have been better to let the plays speak for themselves, rather than exposing the parallels through the stylised sequences between scenes.

Do you know of any plays currently being performed in New York that you think the Secret Victorianist should see? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

Theatre Review: Miss Julie, Theatre of Nations, Lincoln Center Festival, New York City Center, New York

August Strindberg’s 1888 naturalistic masterpiece is transported from Midsummer’s Eve in nineteenth-century Sweden, to New Year’s Eve in Putin’s Russia, in the Russian language adaptation of Miss Julie the Secret Victorianist attended last weekend.

Khamatova and Mironov in Miss Julie (Photo: Kirill Iosipenko)

The eponymous Count’s daughter is now only child of an army general, and her sparring partner, Jean, is transformed from valet to chauffeur, while the third member of this triangle – Christine – is still a cook, albeit in a glittering stainless steel kitchen.

Some elements of the setting work well. The class-based power play feels modern and doesn’t lose any of its impact, as, despite the changed context, some of the play’s concerns remain very true. Julie parades her wealth (changing outfits, slipping in and out of her towering shoes) and her dominion (ordering Jean to join her in karaoke for instance), while the servant characters still believably have more than enough leverage of their own – their intimate access to their employers’ lives, Jean’s higher level of sexual experience, and the more visceral nature of their existence. The production opens with video – Christine prepares a chicken for cooking, a bird’s eye camera giving us a detailed view of the process – and as the production continues, the camera at times comes to rest on Julie’s face, subjecting her to the same kind of scrutiny and usage.

Khamatova and Mironov in Miss Julie (Photo: Kirill Iosipenko)

Less successful is the presentation of the gender dynamics at work in Strindberg’s play. The total power shift towards the man which must come in the nineteenth century post-consummation, just doesn’t seem relevant here, and Julie’s reaction to losing her virginity seems disproportionate from a twenty-first century heiress, whose house is currently filled with gyrating and copulating ravers. Jean’s physical strength (he is even able to shut Julie in a freezer at one point in this production) becomes a proxy for the more complex workings of male privilege that were relevant in the 1800s, even when a woman was of a higher class than her lover.

Chulpan Khamatova, as Miss Julie, and Evgeny Mironov, as Jean, are well-matched in director Thomas Ostermeier’s production, and I always found myself drawn to watching them deliver their lines and react to each other, even when reading the English supertitles. The set too, worked well - the rotating mechanism and dividing screen allowing for some concealment and variation, even while maintaining the claustrophobic feeling of Strindberg’s original single setting.

Provocative in its time, Miss Julie is still thought-provoking, engrossing, and affecting, today. I’m not sure, due to Julie’s insufficient motives (described above), that this production ever quite attained tragic heights, but I’d still strongly recommend it.

Do you know any other nineteenth-century plays currently on stage in New York? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: Creditors, August Strindberg, Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New York City

August Strindberg’s Creditors is a stark, brutal and intensely modern play, first performed in 1889. It’s a play without embellishment and with total focus on its three characters, who play out the plot in a series of intense duologues, ultimately destroying each other. There is Tekla, a successful novelist, her husband Adolph, a young painter, and her former husband Gustav, who gatecrashes the new couple’s life to assert his own power.

It may sound like heavy watching, but it’s also in many ways comedic, from Gustav’s machinations, to the instances of stage eavesdropping. The question at its heart is ‘what does marriage mean?’ and more particularly, ‘has the meaning of marriage changed now divorce and remarriage is a real possibility?’ Strindberg’s script – presented here in a new version by David Greig – is obsessed with the playing out of gender in this new world of relationships. Tekla (played here by Elise Stone), unlike most nineteenth-century women, is more sexually experienced than her husband. She is also older and more successful in her career (and calls him affectionately ‘little brother’). And it is in exploring the effect this has on Adolph that the play is at its strongest.

It is Gustav who combats Tekla’s independence with a return to misogynistic language and tropes. For him a woman is ‘just a fat boy with overdeveloped breasts’. He scorns her, her writing, and her accomplishments. He uses his sexual history with her to diminish her power. And he persuades Adolph to give up painting for sculpture – particularly the sculpting of the female form, with its corresponding overtones of a Pygmalion power dynamic between husband and wife. Josh Tyson, as Adolph, does a good job in displaying his insecurities – the fear that what attracted him to Tekla will also be what makes him lose her. ‘I’ve seen her when you’re not there’, Gustav tells him, trying to convince him that his wife is dangerously unknowable.

Compared to Adolph, Gustav and Tekla’s characters are a little two dimensional in this production. Craig Smith is more convincing as Gustav when he acts as the Machiavellian schemer in the opening portions, than when he comes into contact with Tekla. And Tekla falls short of being a feminist icon, much as Strindberg felt his play had contributed much to Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 Hedda Gabler, giving Stone, at times, little to work with. In a play obsessed with sex, the chemistry is sadly lacking – when the two pairs squabble it’s believable, when they fall into each others’ arms, it’s not. 

Overall, director Kevin Confoy has done a decent job in putting on a really interesting play which has much to recommend it. It’s not one to watch on a first date, or if you’re thinking about popping the question. The moral of the story is: romantic relationships are fraught, relationships between artists mutually destructive, and humans may be capable of loving two people at once, but definitely aren’t good at accepting that from their partners. Some things never change.

You can learn more about the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble and upcoming productions here.

Do you know of any productions of nineteenth-century plays in New York the Secret Victorianist should review? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!