Subtext and Translation: Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at Soulpepper

Nancy Palk and Joseph Ziegler in Ghosts. Photo by Sian Richards

If Henrik Ibsen's plays often seem dated for contemporary audiences, it’s because he was writing about a society that shunned anybody caught having extra-marital affairs and (even worse) contracting VD. He believed, as a playwright, that he had a duty to write about the ultra-conservative Norwegian society and expose it in a new, more dramatic way. Writing from 1850 to 1899, Ibsen is considered the first "modern" dramatist whose caustic characters and real-life subject matter paved the way for George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. He heralded the birth of realism and, much like the simultaneous changes that took place in music and art, his work made waves around the world.

So any kind of consideration of the history of modern plays usually begins with Ibsen. His work is pretty well on every drama student's reading list along with Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck and An Enemy of the People. Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company has already proven an affinity for Ibsen. In 2005, they presented an excellent version of The Wild Duck, offering audiences a chance to see and hear Ibsen’s under-recognized masterpiece.

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

Secrets and Lies: Ghosts, A View from the Bridge, and Cymbeline

Jack Lowden and Lesley Manville in Ghosts, at Trafalgar Studios. (Photo by Hugo Glendinning)

Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, starring Lesley Manville, which opened at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2013 and then moved to Trafalgar Studios, is booked into the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a month beginning Easter weekend. Aside from Manville, I’m not sure which members of the original cast will be appearing in Brooklyn; it is to be hoped that all of them will. I’ve seen a digital transcription of the production as it appeared at Trafalgar Studios, and it’s gripping. Eyre, who also adapted the text, orchestrates the play at a breathless pace, bringing it in at just over an hour and a half without intermissions. (There are three acts, and other versions of it I’ve seen have tended to run about an hour longer.) The urgency of the show dominates the experience, as well as the intimacy of the house, which you can feel even when you see it in HD; I’m not sure how well the second will translate in the BAM space, but certainly it’s well worth seeing in any environment.

Ibsen and Barrie Rarities at the Shaw Festival

Moya O'Connell and Ric Reid in The Lady from the Sea, at Niagara-on-the-Lake's Shaw Festival. (Photo: David Cooper)

The Lady from the Sea is an infrequently performed late Ibsen, one of those realist plays of his that teeters on the edge of symbolism, like The Wild Duck. (He wrote it in 1888, between Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler.) The character who has earned the title moniker among locals in a Norwegian seacoast town is Ellida Wangel. She is married to a devoted doctor but has grown increasingly distant from him and hasn’t quite taken on the burden of stepmother to his two daughters, Bolette and Hilde. He assumes that the problem is her inability to get over the death of their own child (she hasn’t slept with him since), but it’s more complicated. Ellida is haunted by a lost love, an American sailor to whom she was engaged but who ran away to escape imprisonment for the murder of a ship’s captain. The connection she feels to the unnamed American is powerful, primal and also terrifying, because she senses that he is drawing her into the sea itself, where they threw their wedding rings when they plighted their troth. In the course of the play the stranger returns and calls on Ellida to fulfill her promise to him, refusing to recognize her as a woman married to another man.

Rosmersholm: The Pitfalls of Idealism

Hayley Atwell and company in Rosmersholm. (Photo: Johan Persson)

The idealists in Ibsen’s plays invariably end badly – sometimes by destroying the lives of others (Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck is the salient and most shocking example), but almost always by destroying themselves. In Chekhov, as in Shakespeare, human folly is the inescapable verity that always undermines the noble talk, though both these playwrights handle the fools with pity and compassion because they know in their hearts that we’re all fools. Ibsen is less pitying. In his 1886 Rosmersholm, which received an exquisite production in the West End under Ian Rickson’s direction early last summer, almost everyone on stage claims to be living according to an unassailable set of principles. John Rosmer (Tom Burke) is a one-time pastor who abandoned God after the suicide of his invalid wife Beth, but the freedom he asserts he has found is limited by his inability – like, apparently, all his ancestors, whose portraits hang on the walls of his house, Rosmersholm – to express emotion, especially sexually. (This is perhaps Ibsen’s most damning depiction of Scandinavian-Victorian coldness.) Rebecca West (Hayley Atwell), who loves him and lives at Rosmersholm with him though she does not share his bed, credits him with having brought her to enlightenment, but late in the play she confesses that she helped to drive his wife, whose caregiver she was, to her death. Rosmer’s main adversary is his brother-in-law Andreas Kroll (Giles Terrera), the local governor, who represents the forces of conservatism and, like all of Ibsen’s conservatives, is certain that his politics are the bedrock upon which civilization must stand if it is to survive. Kroll’s bugbear is Peter Mortensgaard (Jake Fairbrother), who runs a liberal newspaper; Rosmer, who has not forgiven himself for his unkind treatment of Peter and his now-dead lover (another suicide) in his days as a man of the cloth, offers to support his bid to displace Andreas, only to find that a man who has lost his faith is of no political use to Mortensgaard.

Ibsen Gone Wrong: A Master Builder

Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce in A Master Builder

André Gregory’s staging of Uncle Vanya (in the David Mamet translation), rehearsed over nearly five years and brought to the screen in 1994 by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street, is one of the great achievements in modern American cinema. (I’d say it’s the best movie of the nineties, as well the best rendering of Chekhov I’ve ever seen or ever hope to see.) But Gregory and Jonathan Demme come a cropper with their film of A Master Builder, from Wallace Shawn’s version of Ibsen’s 1892 play, even though Gregory rehearsed it with his cast for even longer than he and his actors worked on Vanya. Ibsen is notoriously difficult to pull off, and Master Builder poses even more daunting challenges than the plays he wrote between 1879 (A Doll House) and 1890 (Hedda Gabler). Some of those texts – The Lady from the Sea and The Wild Duck – have symbolist leanings, but essentially he’s working within a realist framework and with the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama, which he alters in daring ways that made Victorian audiences uneasy. Master Builder, though, moved Ibsen more firmly toward the symbolism of works like Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken. Yet Gregory and his cast – with a single concession – treat it as if it were Chekhov, with disastrous results.

Revivals, Part I: Cyrano de Bergerac & An Enemy of the People

 Douglas Hodge and Clémence Poésy star in Cyrano de Bergerac

Many famous actors have had their fling at playing Edmond Rostand’s hero Cyrano de Bergerac, but the best one I’ve ever seen, hands down, is Christopher Plummer in the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano. In his second go-round with the role – he’d sampled it as a young actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, the same season he played Hamlet – he was mesmerizing, and hilarious. (Runner-up would be a tie between José Ferrer in the 1950 film version and Steve Martin in the updated 1987 movie Roxanne, which is my favorite version of the material.) The most recent Broadway Cyranos have been disappointments: first Kevin Kline in 2007 and now the British actor Douglas Hodge, in the new production at the Roundabout. Kline made the bizarre choice to underplay the role of the seventeenth-century wit, poet and soldier, who, feeling he can’t court the girl he adores, his cousin Roxane, because of the size of his nose, provides her handsome suitor Christian with the words to win her heart. The flamboyant Cyrano is surely one part you should never underplay. Hodge doesn’t make that mistake, and physically, at least, he meets the challenges of the character’s celebrated panache, especially in the first-act scene where he engages in swordplay with the disdainful Valvert (Samuel Roukin) while he composes a poem. (He completes the last line as he deals his opponent the triumphal thrust.) It’s Hodges’s vocal work that comes considerably short of the mark. He does well with the famous speech to the dullard Valvert, anticipating the swordfight, in which he demonstrates a dozen ways in which a man of imagination might approach the matter of insulting his nose. Hodge has a voice like scraped stone, and he knows how to use it cleverly. But this Cyrano is rendered in verse, yet Hodge insists on playing against the meter. Worse, he has a fondness for delivering his lines in a sentimental tremolo that cuts Cyrano’s romantic stoicism. He doesn’t appear to have understood the character – or else (as I suspect) he’s simply indulging himself.

Winners and Losers: Death of a Salesman & The Best Man

There seems to be a new production of Death of a Salesman every decade or decade and a half, and always with an actor you wouldn’t want to miss in the role of Arthur Miller’s psychically disintegrating third-rate drummer Willy Loman. Lee J. Cobb, with Mildred Dunnock as Willy’s long-suffering wife Linda, resurrected the play when they performed it on television in 1966, recreating the performances they’d given under Elia Kazan’s direction on Broadway in 1949. (The TV version, directed by Alex Segal and featuring George Segal and James Farentino as the Loman sons, Biff and Happy, was beautifully executed.) George C. Scott gave a frightening rendition of Willy as a walking time bomb in New York in 1975 opposite Teresa Wright. Directed by David Rudman, Dustin Hoffman reimagined Willy as a distinctly Jewish little man on Broadway in 1984; everyone else in the family – Kate Reid as Linda, John Malkovich as Biff and Stephen Lang as Happy – towered over him. (The TV movie adaptation is so badly directed by Volker Schlondorff that it manages to undercut Hoffman’s amazing performance, though it preserves the power of Malkovich’s.) Robert Falls brought a production to New York from Chicago in 1999 with Brian Dennehy that scaled up the expressionistic touches; it got laudatory reviews but it was misconceived, and Dennehy was hammy and self-serious. Now we have Mike Nichols’s revival with Philip Seymour Hoffman and a recreation of the famous 1949 Jo Mielziner set. And though some people (like Ben Brantley in The New York Times) have caviled about Hoffman’s age – he’s 44 and Willy is 62 – both Cobb in the original Broadway production and Dustin Hoffman in 1984 were also much younger than the character. (Cobb was 37, Hoffman 46.) Actually Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb. The trouble is that goddamn play.

Arthur Miller in New York and London: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman

Benjamin Walker, Tracy Letts, Annette Bening, and Hampton Fluker in All My Sons. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

All My Sons was the first play Arthur Miller had produced on Broadway, in 1947, and for me, at least, it’s the only one that works. Death of a Salesman, written two years later, makes loud proclamations about the American dream, but its argument is confused, and Miller is so careful about maintaining a vague Everyman quality for Willy Loman – choosing a symbolic name rather than an ethnic one, even though the rhythm of the lines sounds distinctly second-generation Jewish-American, and not even detailing exactly what Willy sells on those New England road trips – that the realism grows blurry. (One of the qualities Dustin Hoffman brought to the role when he played it on Broadway in 1984 was an embrace of the Jewishness Miller worked so hard to bury. He was brilliant, though the delicacy of the performance didn’t survive into the clumsy TV movie version directed by Volker Schlondorff.) Miller has big, Ibsen-like ambitions in All My Sons, which is no less than an indictment of the American way of doing business, which he pits against the values he believes were embodied in the sacrifices made by American servicemen in the Second World War. But he’s very specific about what Joe Keller does: he runs a company that manufactures key components in a variety of complicated mechanical items, and during the war he and his partner and neighbor, Steve Deever, turned out cylinder heads for bomber planes. When the process developed a flaw and a batch of the heads came out with cracks in him, the plant covered up the mistake and twenty-one pilots crashed and died. Joe put the blame on Steve, protesting that he was home sick with the flu that day and Steve acted on his own, out of fear of losing the government contract. And though in fact Joe told him exactly what to do, a jury exonerated Joe and sent Steve to prison. All My Sons is set during the twenty-four-hour period, three years later, when Steve’s daughter Ann – once the fiancée of Joe and Kate Keller’s older son, Larry, a pilot himself who went missing around the time his father came to trial – and her brother George return to the Midwestern town where Joe’s plant is now making more money than ever, and the truth is revealed.

I Like to Recognize the Tune: A Doll’s House at the Huntington

Andrea Syglowski and Sekou Laidlow in the Huntington Theatre's A Doll’s House. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

You can set a play by Shakespeare or Molière in any era, but you can’t mess around with the setting of a realist play or it no longer makes sense. Yet contemporary directors keep doing it, subjecting the modern realist classics to time shifts that have the effect of bowdlerizing them. The Abbey Theatre’s touring production of Sean O’Casey’s great tragedy about the Easter 1916 uprising, The Plough and the Stars, which American Repertory Theatre imported to Cambridge last fall, threw it forward into the twenty-first century. In the last act of the Roundabout Theatre’s recent Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s bankrupt Russian aristocrats – a class that was, of course, wiped out or driven into exile by the Russian Revolution – walk out into the world in modern-day outfits. And now we have the Huntington Theatre’s mounting of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (adapted by Bryony Lavery), with an ambiguous setting that is, however, definitely post-1930, judging from the dresses Michael Krass has designed for Nora Helmer (Andrea Syglowski) and her childhood friend Christine Linde (Marinda Anderson).

Overthinking Hedda: Hedda Gabler at the Shaw

Moya O'Connell as Hedda Gabler (Photo by Emily Cooper) 

More than any other playwright, Henrik Ibsen was responsible for bringing the theatre into the modern age, which is why his plays – not just the most frequently performed masterpieces, A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, but also The Wild Duck, Ghosts, The Master Builder, Rosmersholm and Lady from the Sea – feel freshly startling, even devastating, when you pick them up again. (The Shaw Festival did a revelatory staging of the seldom performed Rosmersholm in 2006.) It’s one thing to talk about the modernist qualities of these works, however, and quite another to forget that Ibsen’s heroes and especially his heroines are trapped like flies in amber in the intractable mores of nineteenth-century Norway. A director who ignores the repressed Nordic Victorianism of Ibsen’s age does so at his or her peril. (Anyone remember the Joseph Losey movie of A Doll’s House, with Jane Fonda as a Nora who seemed to have sprung, consciousness fully raised, from the early 1970s?) Hedda Gabler’s sexual curiosity can’t be satisfied in drawing-room banter because she’s a woman; she has to get the information she craves through witty but decorous innuendo and delicately framed allusions. Yet in Martha Henry’s production at the Shaw, when Eilert Loevborg (Gray Powell), who once courted Hedda (Moya O’Connell), meets her at the house she has just moved into with her new husband, George Tesman (Patrick McManus), Eilert puts his hand unabashedly on Hedda’s leg while Tesman and family friend Judge Brack (Jim Mezon) are in another room drinking glasses of punch. When Hedda finally admits to her husband that she’s (unhappily) pregnant with his child, a subject discussed in polite Victorian society with only the most indirect phrasing, O’Connell thrusts his hand onto her belly. When the judge returns in the last act to bring the news that Loevborg has shot himself, Mezon’s gestures make it explicitly clear that the fatal bullet lodged in his groin. When he blackmails her by threatening to expose the fact that Hedda let him have one of her father’s pistols, this Brack practically forces himself on her (presumably in case we miss the aim of the blackmail).

Chekhov and Ibsen at the National Theatre

I understand the need to find translations of Chekhov and Ibsen that don’t provide obstacle courses for contemporary actors; one of the reasons André Gregory was able to do the phenomenal work he did with the cast of Vanya on 42nd Street was that David Mamet made the language so limpid and close to the natural rhythms of American actors. But the rage for new versions of the plays, often mired in contemporary clichés, is infuriating. In Pam Gems’s rewrite of A Doll’s House, Krogstad warns Christine, “Goes around, comes around,” and I’ve heard a student actor perform a scene in Uncle Vanya in which Astrov uses the expletive “fucking.” That can’t be a reasonable solution. In Andrew Upton’s version of The Cherry Orchard performed by Britain’s National Theatre (and widely seen abroad in HD), Gaev (James Laurenson) calls Lopakhin (Conleth Hill) a “crap artist” and Lyubov Ranevskaya (Zoë Wanamaker), rather than just excoriating the eternal student Trofimov (Mark Bonnar) for having no mistress at his age, grabs at his crotch and wonders out loud if he’s got anything at all down there. But the real offense in Upton’s Cherry Orchard is his lengthy addenda, which seem to have two purposes – to overemphasize the political subtext (the second-act debate between Trofimov and Lopakhin is about one and a half times longer than the one Chekhov wrote) and to make sure the audience doesn’t miss the point. That must be why Yasha (Gerald Kyd), Lyubov's manservant, takes three times as many lines as Chekhov wrote for him to persuade her to take him along when she returns to Paris. (Yasha, born a peasant but determined to rise in the world, is more or less a comic variation on the self-educated valet Jean in Strindberg's Miss Julie.)  Does Upton really think he can improve on Chekhov?

Rutherford and Son: Imitation Ibsen

Roger Allam in Rutherford and Son at London's National Theatre.. (Photo: Johan Persson)

Roger Allam delivers a flawless performance as the icy, single-minded North Country industrialist John Rutherford Sr. in the National Theatre production of Githa Sowerby’s 1912 play Rutherford and Son. Allam is an actor’s actor. I saw him last season as quite a different sort of rich man, the warm, voluble John Christie, the founder of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, in David Hare’s The Moderate Soprano, and the two characters are so utterly unalike you can scarcely believe they’re created by the same man. The film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Jane Fonda as the prostitute Bree Daniel in Klute that when she walks toward the camera it’s Bree and not Fonda you see coming toward you, and that’s the way I felt about Allam in Rutherford and Son: he’s sealed himself inside the character, and the completeness of the portrait is mesmerizing, in the way that a great Rembrandt or Monet portrait is.

The Shaw’s Early Shaw: Arms and the Man & The Philanderer

Kate Besworth and Martin Happer star in the Shaw Festival’s production of Arms and the Man (Photo: Emily Cooper)

In George Bernard Shaw’s early comedy Arms and the Man, Bulgaria is at war with Serbia, and the heroine, Raina, the daughter of one major and the fiancée of another, glories in the excitement of the conflict and the swashbuckling self-presentation of the latter, a handsome warrior named Sergius who marches into the fray like a character out of a Walter Scott novel. But on the last night of battle, a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs, Captain Bluntschli, slips into her boudoir to escape from the Bulgarians, and she doesn’t have the heart to give him away. She even feeds him – chocolate creams, his favorite. (She nicknames him her “chocolate cream soldier”; hence the title of the Oscar Strauss operetta version of the material, The Chocolate Soldier.) Bluntschli’s conduct offends her notions of how soldiers should comport themselves, but he and not Sergius is a professional soldier; he finds Sergius’s heroics ridiculous (not to say dangerous). But while Bluntschli undercuts Raina’s schoolgirl notions, he also wins her heart; Shaw’s play may burlesque the romantic temperament, but it’s a romantic comedy and one of his most lighthearted works. It’s also, not surprisingly, one of his most frequently produced plays.

New Takes on Modernist Classics

Dani De Waal, Miles Anderson, and Mary VanArsdel in Heartbreak House. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

This piece contains reviews of Hartford Stage's Heartbreak House, Irish Repertory Theatre's The Emperor Jones, National Theatre's Hedda Gabler, and John Golden Theatre's A Doll’s House, Part 2.

When Andrew Long strides onstage in Heartbreak House at Hartford Stage as captain of industry Boss Mangan, made up and bewigged to look like a parody of Donald Trump, the production utterly loses its moorings. I guess that the director, Darko Tresnjak, couldn’t resist – but he should have. George Bernard Shaw’s “fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes,” as the playwright billed it, written during the First World War but not performed until 1919, is a one-of-a-kind high comedy: Shaw’s take on Chekhov transforms him in the process, but the experiment has an equally transformative effect on Shaw. The dialogue sounds like Shaw, the sly challenges to accepted social and political attitudes smack of Shaw, but the air of fatalistic melancholy (inspired by the fact of the war) is distinctly Chekhovian, and the result is a play unlike anything else Shaw ever wrote. Transposing a replica of Trump out of Saturday Night Live isn’t meant to transport the play to the present day (the actors are still wearing Edwardian outfits) but to make it relevant to contemporary audiences, as if one of the undisputed masterpieces of the modern theatre didn’t already offer enough to engage them. And the decision to Trump Mangan makes nonsense out of the proceedings. Every time he makes a comment about politics, the audience laughs – not because it’s witty or the actor has mined its comic potential but because we make the connection to Trump, even though the connection isn’t real but merely a red arrow inked by Tresnjak on the surface of Shaw’s text. Everything the character says and does, everything about the way he looks and the way he sounds, takes us out of the play.

Neglected Gem #21: Death and the Maiden (1994)

Stuart Wilson, Ben Kingsley, and Sigourney Weaver star in Death and the Maiden

In Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, set in an unidentified South American country after the fall of a dictatorship, a woman comes across the man who tortured and raped her, repeatedly, to the strains of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Paulina is now married to Gerardo Escobar, the man who recruited her to fight in the underground against the junta – caught and imprisoned, she endured the torture rather than reveal his name – and who has just been selected to chair the newly formed human rights commission, mandated to investigated the atrocities committed under the old government. But Paulina fears a whitewash, since the only cases the commission plans to investigate are the ones that ended in death. So when Escobar, stuck with a broken-down car in a fierce rainstorm, invites into their home the stranger who rescued him with a lift, and Paulina recognizes her rapist, Miranda, she ties him up, gags him, and initiates her own kangaroo court, seeking a justice she’s certain the commission will never exact.

This script, which was produced in London with Juliet Stevenson and on Broadway with Glenn Close (and Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss as the two men), is a particularly moronic example of the social-problem melodrama. A play of this kind – another, with a similar plot, is William Mastrosimone’s Extremities – uses simplistic, easily identifiable characters to pound out its thesis, reducing complex issues to neatly carved-out slabs of narrative information labeled with little tags to explain what they mean and how we’re intended to view them. The dramatic progression, which is supposed to feel inexorable, is exasperatingly predictable, since after the first half hour or so no one shows any new sides. A play like Death and the Maiden is a corruption of the social dramas Ibsen wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, which reimagined the well-made boulevard melodramas of Scribe and Sardou to land the Victorian audience, by the end, in strange, uncharted territory, without moorings. By contrast, a twelve-year-old could read the map of a play like Death and the Maiden. And maybe that’s why these bastard children of Ibsen and the socialist playwrights of the thirties are always so popular: audiences, and reviewers, too, feel safe basking in their confirmation of the currently accepted stands on a variety of political issues. (Angels in America is the most famous, and most overblown, American entry in this genre.)

Rewriting History: Edith Wharton’s The Shadow of a Doubt

Author and playwright Edith Wharton 

The discovery of a neglected work by Edith Wharton has understandably made headlines in a number of high-profile publications, in particular The New Yorker. However, the story behind Wharton's play, The Shadow of a Doubt, and its reemergence into the public consciousness is more complicated than the oversimplified narrative of a “lost” play being plucked from oblivion by intrepid scholars, and it points to the messy way in which we build and organize our ostensibly tidy literary and theatrical canons. The Shadow of a Doubt has made the news thanks to the efforts of Dr. Mary Chinery and Dr. Laura Rattray, two scholars from Georgian Court University and the University of Glasgow, respectively, who began discussing the little-known work at a conference and subsequently examined a manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. They’ve reproduced the manuscript, typos and all, and it’s available to read in The Edith Wharton Review. It’s free at the time of this writing, but will eventually disappear behind a paywall; you can find it here, along with the accompanying article by Drs. Chinery and Rattray. (They also spoke with me on the Theatre History Podcast to explain the play’s significance.)

The Shadow of a Doubt primarily offers a starring vehicle for the actress playing its heroine, Kate Derwent. Kate, a former nurse, has married her late patient’s husband John, who grew close to her during his wife’s final days. Given the circumstances of their meeting, as well as Kate’s lowlier background, it’s not surprising that their union occasions some tension within John’s wider family and social circles. His father-in-law, Lord Osterleigh, is particularly skeptical, his granddaughter Sylvia’s evident affection notwithstanding. (She keeps calling Kate “Mamma,” even though her stepmother, fearful of being seen to supplant Sylvia’s late mother Agnes too completely, encourages the girl to call her by her first name.) The arrival of a disgraced doctor, Carruthers, throws this uneasy situation into turmoil; he’s threatening, in a plot device that’s clearly taken from the well-made-play tradition of Ibsen and his predecessors, to ruin Kate’s reputation by revealing information about how the first Mrs. Derwent met her end.

Stratford and the Shaw Festival: New and Old

The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.)

Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.

A Winter's Tale: Before Midnight

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight (2013)

The warm breezes, poetic ruins and pure, sun-soaked hues of the southern Peloponnese at summer’s end is the setting for Before Midnight, the third in a series of films made by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as the Franco-American lovers Jesse and Celine. (It opened in Toronto on Friday.) As far as I can tell, there are no fans of these movies, only devotees. Distinctly American in their frank, colloquial style, but inspired by the intimacy and spontaneous, kinetic realism of the French and Italian New Wave, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) quietly invited their audience to listen in on an unfolding conversation between two lovers that explored the substance of romantic connection. They meet (in Before Sunrise) on a train and get off together in Vienna to fall in love during a sleepless night before Jesse has to catch his next train, and meet again (in Before Sunset) in Paris, where Celine lives, on the last leg of Jesse’s book tour for a novel about their one-night love affair, having lost track of each other for nine years. In Before Sunset, Jesse was married with a two year-old son, Hank, back in New York, but the implication at the end of the film, which was set in real time in the ninety minutes before Jesse had to catch his plane back to the States, was that having found one another again, Jesse and Celine would stay together.

Grandstanding: Other Desert Cities

Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach in Other Desert Cities (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Jon Robin Baitz’s critically acclaimed new Broadway play Other Desert Cities is an American family drama with an eleventh-hour revelation. Structurally and generically it harks back to the Victorian-era well-made plays that Ibsen and Chekhov each took a hand in sabotaging but that survived nonetheless into the twentieth century, where they furnished a model for American playwrights like Arthur Miller (who added a Freudian element) and later a blueprint for TV serials. Baitz must think he’s creating something new because he’s stocked his play with political content, but it’s a screechy, grandstanding melodrama in which every hinge creaks.

The setting is Palm Springs, where Polly and Lyman Wyeth’s two grown-up children have come out to spend Christmas with them. Lyman (Stacy Keach) is a retired ambassador and he and Polly are still conspicuously active in Republican circles. (Polly is played by Stockard Channing, but I saw her understudy, Lauren Klein.) Before they entered politics both Wyeths had Hollywood lives, Lyman as a handsome leading man while Polly and her sister Silda (Judith Light), transplanted Texas girls, wrote a series of popular detective movies. The team split up when the two sisters stopped getting along well enough to collaborate, and their animosity is more apparent than ever now that Silda, a recovering alcoholic, has moved in with Polly and Lyman. Their son Trip (Thomas Sadoski) produces a TV show called Jury of Your Peers in which the jury is made up of celebrities. Their daughter Brooke (Rachel Griffiths) is a journalist who has just completed a manuscript. When the family is assembled she announces that it’s a memoir about the family, centered on the tragedy they’ve never recovered from: during Vietnam their eldest, Henry, became involved with a radical anti-war group that bombed a recruitment center, killing a homeless man, and out of guilt and despair Henry drowned himself. Brooke has never forgiven her parents for turning their coming-apart son away when he sought their help after the bombing, nor has she recovered, after all these years, from the feeling that Henry, her hero, abandoned her when she was a little girl, not even leaving a note for her when he chose to take his life. This event which almost destroyed her family haunted her into her shaky adulthood – she’s had a breakdown and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. In researching the book she’s used her aunt as a resource. Silda has her own axe to grind: her fury that her sister and brother-in-law’s fervent loyalty to the GOP cause prompted them to see their own son, whom they struggled to bring up in their political image, as a traitor for defecting to the left wing.