STAGE REVIEW : War of Sexes Rages in ‘Dance of Death’

When Edgar says of his wife, Alice, “We were destined to torment one another,” he’s putting only one aspect of August Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” into self-evident perspective. To a modern audience, this Edgar and Alice can be readily identified as the brooding fin-de-siecle predecessors of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s” George and Martha. But that only tells half the tale.

Strindberg’s “Dance” is a much more sweeping indictment of life in all aspects of its perversity. The war of the sexes is its most visible irony, but Strinberg’s cynical view extends far beyond that. It presents human activity as a comprehensively absurdist panorama. And its ending--almost upbeat by the rest of the play’s standards--is a twist that reminds us less of Albee than of Samuel Beckett.

Perhaps that emphasis is especially palpable in the production that opened Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, because its director is Alan Mandell, a Beckett specialist. The ending takes on a vigor, even a humor, that one wishes were present earlier in the performance.

Alice (Marian Mercer) and Edgar (Mitchell Ryan) are two people on whom life has played a variety of cruel jokes. They were thrown together by ill-fated design. Their 25-year marriage has been unrelieved hell. Two of their children died. The other two have been unhappy foils in the marital wars. As the captain of an island outpost where the north wind buffets the walls and the emotions (this “home” is a former prison), the quarrelsome Edgar, who was passed over for promotion, nurses a bitterness that has turned him against not just his wife but the entire world. And now his failing health is turning bitterness to rage.

Alice, at the receiving end of the rage, finds it contagious. She’s a steely woman whose strength has become vitiated by loneliness, boredom and the distorting hatred she’s grown to bear her husband. She sees him as the boor who’s kept her down, turned her children against her and cut her off from others, especially Kurt, a distant relative and former lover she’s convinced she should have married. When Kurt (H. Richard Greene) shows up on the island as its newly appointed quarantine officer, the dance of death is all set to begin.

Rarely has Strindberg’s craftsmanship been more carefully detailed than in this play. But if the emerging portrait in cynicism is as unshakable as that grim island fortress that Edgar and Alice inhabit, the sensibility is darkly Victorian, which means theatrically self-important, so that the slightest misstep can turn this violent drama into mawkish melodrama.

This is not averted at LATC, where enough of the chemistry misfired opening night to provoke the wrong kind of tittering at the wrong times. The moves are correct under Mandell’s direction, but their calibration is off and the relationships labored. Connections often miss. Alice’s viciousness, more pernicious because it is so much more powerless than Edgar’s, is not second nature to Mercer. The result is overcompensation, which forces the character.

This situation is not aided by Greene’s wimpishness as Kurt, admittedly the play’s most difficult and thankless role. Even if Alice’s memory had magnified his charms, there was an attraction there once that needs to be rekindled, but not between these two actors, on whom lust and passion feel relentlessly superimposed.

Only Ryan, in the play’s most powerful and complex role, succeeds in presenting his Edgar with such primordial force and stoic diversity that he emerges with his dignity intact--less a brute than a hardened warrior who has trafficked in particularly difficult trenches. It is a memorable performance that lends full credibility to the play’s final scene. Edgar’s closing “Let’s go on” is pointedly reminiscent of Beckett. And it fits.

Marianna Elliott’s apt turn-of-the-century costumes and John Iacovelli’s stone tower of a set, gloomily lit by Brian Gale, with incandescent sunsets burning in the background, satisfy the play’s symbolism and mass. Effects, too, don’t miss a trick, from the swinging chandelier to the rattling windows, subjected to sound designer Jon Gottlieb’s harrowing winds. Would that they could supply the juice absent from other aspects of the production.

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2, until Feb. 11. Call for holiday schedule. Tickets: $22-$26; (213) 627-5599.