This Day in Theater History (August Strindberg, Influential Swedish Playwright, Born)

January 22, 1849—August Strindberg, born in Stockholm, Sweden, grew up in a household marked by parental differences over class and temperament, leaving the hypersensitive youngster scarred for life, possibly insane at points, and in such need of expunging his feelings about the war between the sexes that he poured it out into 62 plays, along with novels, essays, short stories, memoirs, poems, and theses on science, philosophy and philology—collected works amounting to 50 volumes.

Biographer Olof Lagercrantz has questioned just how dire the future playwright’s birth and upbringing were. While his mother was, for a time, a servant, she and her husband, a businessman, had become members of the medium-income bourgeoisie in his youth. But his mother’s death when he was 13 subsequently colored his feelings about growing up, to the point that he later lamented having been born under the sign of Ram, destined to be butchered, with “Every success a consequence of suffering, every trace of happiness tainted by dirt; every encouragement a mockery, every good deed punished by crucifixion.” If nothing else, he came to have a world-class temperament for raising every minor annoyance of life into Greek tragedy.

In a prior post, I discussed Strindberg’s similarities with Eugene O’Neill, an American acolyte who also suffered childhood traumas related to a mother, attempted suicide in youth, battled with loss of religious belief, and experienced problematic productions of his plays during his lifetime. But O’Neill wasn’t the only playwright influenced by the melancholy, mad Swede; you only have to look to the works of Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee to see how his path-breaking concern with the psyche entered into the DNA of the modern drama.

Two major film auteurs also harked back to Strindberg. Ingmar Bergman, who was familiar with the other great Scandinavian’s work at the tender age of 12, thereafter regarded him as his “companion for life,” according to an essay by Egil Tornqvist, professor emeritus of Scandinavian studies at the University of Amsterdam. Indeed, Bergman would be responsible for 28 Strindberg productions for stage, television and radio throughout his lifetime. Even a screenplay of his own, Persona, features a plot point borrowed from Strindberg’s one-act The Stronger: an actress who suddenly stops talking.

Yet another figure looking back to Strindberg is Woody Allen. Isaac Davis, the principal figure of his 1979 film, Manhattan, remarks, “When it comes to relationships with women, I’m the winner of the August Strindberg Award.” It’s a comic summary of a character who struggles with relationships with a lesbian ex-wife who exposes his shortcomings as lover and husband in a bestselling tell-all, Marriage, Divorce and Selfhood; with the mistress of his married best friend; and with a 17-year-old high-school student. And, for a screenwriter famous for writing so many great roles for women, Allen’s own offscreen relationships mirror Strindberg’s in their turbulence. 

(Even before the two-decade tabloid war with ex-lover Mia Farrow, Allen was sued several years after their divorce by first wife Harlene Rosen, who understandably took exception to being made the centerpiece of his nightclub act with jokes such as this: “My first wife lives on the Upper West Side and I read in the paper the other day that she was violated on her way home—knowing my first wife, it was not a moving violation.”)

As might be expected from one of the most wildly misogynistic creative artists of all time, Strindberg persistently depicted men at bay. The principal male figures in two of his most frequently performed plays, The Father and The Dance of Death, collapse with strokes, a kind of psychological unmanning at the hands of a gender that, he believed, held the mental upper hand in any relationship and therefore did not require the reforms urged by the feminist movement. This was all par for the course for someone who regarded women as an “army of whores and would-be whores—professional whores with abnormal inclinations.”

Well, as for “abnormal inclinations,” it takes one to know one, I guess. This is a fellow with three wives whom he ended up divorcing, one woman to whom he was engaged for 24 hours, numerous other mistresses, and a sister, Anna von Philp, for whom, biographer Michael Meyer believes, he harbored a strong physical attraction. (That didn’t prevent him from tossing her out of the house when she took pity after listening to his ceaseless complaints about his terrible cooks and came to help for a week.)

Strindberg fascinates me for another reason: he might have been the most unlikely writer to work in a job I held for two decades: librarian. Journalism did not appeal to him, and he came to feel that university life at Uppsala represented “a nest of owls.” But, at least for a while—eight years—he found a congenial home, at age 25, in a position procured for him by friends: Sweden’s Royal Library. It not only provided him with the income to marry his first wife (which, admittedly, the two of them might have eventually regarded as a mixed blessing), but with much-needed intellectual subsistence. He became especially interested in anthropology and, as a result of learning Chinese to aid in cataloguing, the Far East, inspiring his A Dream Play.

Influenced by the head of the library, the mystic Gustav Klemming, Strindberg also first became interested in the occult. Nearly two decades later, the playwright gave full vent to this interest in what has become known as his Occult Diary, a 12-year record of his dreams, coincidences, correspondences between seemingly unlike things, and events that could not be explained by rational means. Even at the start of this psychological exploration, the playwright, used to controversy by this time, wrote: “This diary must never be printed!” (A fascinating post on the Yale Books Blog discusses what this meant for his art.)

The dramatist of instability and altered states, Strindberg broke free of the tradition of the well-made play in a manner that even his great Scandinavian theater rival, Henrik Ibsen, couldn’t approach. His plays offer actors the opportunity to play complicated characters with larger-than-life but still recognizable dimensions, as in the production of The Dance of Death I saw at Broadway’s Broadhurst theater in the fall of 2001 starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren.

Strindberg departed from the poetic, historical epic dramas characteristic of the Scandinavian theater world of his time in favor of forays into naturalism, symbolism and even hints of expressionism. In particular, Miss Julie, his 1888 psychosexual drama of a wild fling between an aristocratic young woman and her servant, has proven quite a touchstone for contemporary class-conscious playwrights, with two adaptations that translated its setting into later times. I reviewed the Roundabout Theatre’s 2009 production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie (set on the night when Conservative Winston Churchill lost to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party) here, and two months ago Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company staged Yael Farber’s Mies Julie (set on a South African estate after apartheid).

(The accompanying photographic self-portrait, done around 1892, captures the dark, haunted nature of Strindberg better than any other image I can think of.)

This Day in Theater History (Eugene O’Neill, Nobel-Winning Playwright, Dies)

November 27, 1953—Three days after barely croaking out, in a disgusted whisper, “Born in a hotel—and, goddamn it, died in a hotel!”, Eugene O’Neill—worn out from more than a decade of battling a degenerative neuromuscular disease that robbed him of the ability to write—passed away at age 65.

O’Neill died in the Shelton Hotel, along the Charles River in Boston, not that far removed geographically but quite distant psychologically from the Times Square room where his mother had given birth to him. Practically by virtue of birthplace and patrimony (father James O’Neill had earned a tidy fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo), he must have felt born to the theater. Now, with a generation passed since he had revolutionized Broadway with his tragedies, he seemed largely forgotten, even though he was (and remains to this day) America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright.

Some students at Boston University, which bought the building and converted it into a dormitory after O’Neill’s death, have sworn from time to time that they have heard strange noises coming from the room he once occupied. But would it surprise anyone, really, that O’Neill should haunt these premises? If any dead person would be inclined to haunting, it was him. After all, in life he had been haunted by his mother, whose morphine addiction began when a quack doctor administered it to her to ease the pain of delivering Eugene at birth; his father, an immigrant from the Ireland of the era of the Great Famine, whose fear of poverty had pushed him toward quacks drove him to take on the role that forever typecast him as an actor; and brother Jamie, a charmer who ended up squandering his promise on booze, hookers and cynicism.

O’Neill had taken the full measure of his tortured family in two plays on which he had labored mightily but had not staged or even published in his lifetime: Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. The relationship with the woman who had created an environment in which he could produce these harrowing dramas, his third wife Carlotta, had seen her relationship to her husband deteriorate, under pressure of a disease that resembled Parkinson’s, from muse to nurse to partner in a dance of death. She had separated from him five years before, but was there now for his final struggle with death.

In a prior post, I discussed the resemblances between O’Neill and another American Nobel laureate, Ernest Hemingway, chiefly in terms of how ill health in their fifties had sidelined them from pursuing the most ambitious projects of their careers (for O’Neill, the multipart historical epic A Tale of Possessers Self-Dispossessed; for Hemingway, his “Land, Sea and Air Trilogy”).

Yet, in re-reading a phrase from that prior paragraph, “dance of death,” I’m reminded of the similarities between O’Neill and a playwright that had influenced him immensely, August Strindberg. Both the American and the Swede suffered childhood traumas related to their mothers; both had attempted suicide in their youth, and continued to be plagued by depression through the remainder of their lives; both felt keenly in adulthood the loss of their belief in the religion of their youth (O’Neill, Roman Catholicism; Strindberg, Lutheranism); both had explored Eastern mystical traditions when their faith in Western thought was shattered;  both had anguished relationships with three wives and their children; and both had experienced problematic productions of later plays that had led to critical devaluations of their work in their later years.

The last wives of Strindberg and O’Neill had, in a sense, betrayed their husbands at the end. But while Harriet Bosse broke off her relationship with Strindberg for good on the verge of a remarriage to another man, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill saved her husband’s reputation by disobeying his wishes. He had insisted that Long Day’s Journey Into Night only be published 25 years after his death; but, three years after his passing in the Shelton Hotel, she overrode the objections of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf to have this play published and staged. That production, starring Fredric March and Jason Robards, removed O’Neill from critical oblivion.

"A sense of homelessness came to O'Neill quite naturally," wrote critic-novelist Thomas Flanagan, in a piece in his marvelous essay collection, There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History. Flanagan, before finally naming the place that O'Neill regarded as the first real home of his life (Tao House, east of San Francisco), listed at length virtually everywhere else this restless heart had briefly decamped: "Hotel bedrooms, rented houses, strict Catholic boarding schools, the bars of flophouses, the flimsy clapboards of Provincetown shacks, a 'bastard Spanish peasant style' house off the coast of Georgia, a French chateau." Because of Carlotta, who shared his last anguished days in a lonely Boston hotel, O'Neill was able to occupy what now seems like a permanent place as the foremost American playwright. 

 

Theater Review: “After Miss Julie,” Presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co.

Count on a New Yorker to ask an impertinent question. At a post-show “talk-back” discussion matinee last month for After Miss Julie, presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co., one audience member couldn’t restrain himself: “Why did Roundabout think it necessary to put this very dated British play on in New York?”

Ouch—it must have hurt the staff of the Roundabout to hear that. Patrick Marber, after all, had updated—well, okay, at least reduced the interval between then and now by half----from August Strindberg’s fierce, pathbreaking 1888 drama, to the night of the Labour Party victory in the U.K. in July 1945. And the Roundabout hadn’t just gotten anyone for the adaptation—Marber had street cred with the buzz-worthy flicks Closer and Notes on a Scandal, and the nonprofit theater company had worked with him previously on Howard Katz. What could go wrong?

If the fall theater season were baseball, then the Roundabout would be batting a healthy .333, with one hit (Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, which I’ll review soon) out of three times at bat (the three shows that I have seen, or plan to, by year's end, anyway). But Bye Bye Birdie has endured some of the most ferocious reviews for a musical that the company has ever presented, and After Miss Julie would probably be DOA by now if it had been mounted by a for-profit theater company.

The “revisal”—a revival of a classic that goes beyond a new production to offer a revised script—has become practically de rigueur with Broadway musicals, whose producers undoubtedly hope that critics will stop using the dreaded cliché “dated” (maybe that audience member I saw was a critic in sheep’s clothing?).

But a revisal of a straight play has now become quite the thing, too, with John Millington Synge and Chekhov, among others, coming in for this treatment. But guess what? It doesn’t mean the results are any better.

In a way, Marber—who wrote this originally as a 1995 BBC teleplay—has attempted to do what directors of Shakespeare have done over the centuries: i.e., prove a playwright's continuing relevance by staging his plays in every time but his own.

You can almost see the wheels turn in the minds of the Roundabout powers-that-be, still in their default Anglophile mode (Sunday in the Park With George, The Philanthropist, The 39 Steps, etc.) from the last several seasons, as they considered the new setting: Hmmm…the action takes place on a night when a conservative party, after years of trying, all-consuming war, gets turned out of office resoundingly by the electorate in favor of the progressives. It’s a new dawn! So familiar! Our Blue State, Manhattan-centric audience will have no problem connecting the dots here!

But here’s the problem—Marber and director Mark Brokaw have juiced up the action (the evidence of two characters’ intercourse becomes all too evident to a third), as well as the dialogue (one lover uses the F-word), but it’s like colorizing a classic 1940 film noir: the new tones don’t enhance the impression left but detract from it. Amazingly, they’ve sensationalized and sexed everything up, only to leave a less searing work.

They did so by disregarding one of the central dictates of Strindberg’s dramaturgy: “The joy of life is in its cruel and powerful struggles.”

In detailing the fall of the young aristocrat Miss Julie, following an impulsive, mad tryst with one of her father’s hired help, the Swedish playwright vented instincts and beliefs that more than a few people would find objectionable today: misogyny and a Darwinism as relentlessly predetermined as any credo created by John Calvin. His male servant, Jean, follows as rapid an ascent as any heat-seeking missile. Strindberg doesn’t bother to justify or sugarcoat this vision.

There’s nothing moral about any of this, any more than there’s anything remotely moral about large animals circling prey. It simply is.

In seeing how well Strindberg’s then-shocking psychological drama would translate into today’s terms, Marber & the Roundabout might have recalled the cautionary tale of Arthur Miller, who decided to adapt Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People for Broadway. So much made the play pertinent to the era of the Red Scare, Miller thought, especially the unwillingness of the townspeople to tolerate dissent. Oh, there were problems, too, with Ibsen’s version, such as the hero’s propensity to spout then-fashionable eugenics theory (very unfashionable after WWII), but Miller would take care of that.

Miller did, all right—but in the process he eliminated Ibsen’s mockery of the hero-doctor’s own naïve idealism, which made the play simultaneously entertaining and complex. The American’s Dr. Stockmann, then, became a humorless, hectoring saint that no Broadway audience wanted any part of.

Something of the same syndrome is occurring onstage at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. Strindberg’s style is as blunt as a roundhouse blow out of nowhere that sends one to the canvass; Marber, attempting to show the characters’ occasional tenderness, mixing in his own reflections on sex, class and power, exhausts himself and the audience in the process.

Not that this is a complete wreck of a play, as a number of critics have implied.

Marber displays a welcome penchant for one-liners, as when John (Strindberg’s renamed servant Jean), compares, with deep satisfaction, a bourbon he has just drunk with that night’s landslide loser, Sir Winston Churchill: “Robust, hearty…and finished.”

The third character in this love triangle, another servant, Christine (Kristin in the original), comes off as stronger, in certain ways, than in the Strindberg version. Marin Ireland brings such intelligence and asperity to the role that many audience members will wonder why on earth John decided to cheat on Christine.

The hinge actor in this production is Jonny Lee Miller, who renders John as a credible mix of ambition, sexual desire, and hyper-awareness of social norms.

Sienna Miller doesn’t fare as well as her onstage colleagues. What’s the problem? Terry Teachout, the normally sound Wall Street Journal critic, wrote recently that Ms. Miller “has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue. The Roundabout Theatre Company should be ashamed of itself for asking her to do so.”

Mr. Teachout has a problem with the Roundabout trading on her glamorous appeal. Other critics can't get out of their minds that a young, scandal-plagued thespian is playing a young, scandal-plagued aristocrat. But if actors’ pasts are going to be reviewed alongside their current performances, who will be left to step on a Big Apple stage?

As for Ms. Miller’s looks, they work, at least initially, to the production’s advantage. It takes an extraordinary force to induce John to risk everything for which he’s striven for years, all for the sake of a fling with an arrogant woman who makes the mistake of stooping below her station.

With the help of costume designer Michael Krass, Ms. Miller, appearing in the servants' kitchen unexpectedly to demand a dance from her dad's handsome chauffeur, freezes the action. No woman in white has created so much havoc in the male libido since Lana Turner drove John Garfield around the bend in the film The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ms. Miller should not be reproved for trying to expand her dramatic range, nor should the Roundabout be scolded for permitting her to do so.

No, I’m afraid that Marber is at fault for the holes in After Miss Julie. Strindberg had already provided so many motivations for Miss Julie’s erratic behavior that he created one of the most coveted female roles of the last century and a half.

Marber has tossed in additional unnecessary motives that make a difficult task—explaining Miss Julie’s path to self-destruction—even harder than it has to be. No, I’m afraid that this time it’s the playwright, not the blonde, who’s the dumb one in this production.