There Are Many Kinds of Bottles for Old Wine

Sylvie Drake’s review of recent productions of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (July 13) and of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” at the Pasadena Playhouse (July 17) raise the perennial issue of directorial license in the production of “classic” plays and the even broader issue of “realism” as an aesthetic.

In reviewing “The Wild Duck,” Drake notes that the production makes use of a set designed for “effect rather than functionality” and complains that the resulting spatial arrangement “parts company with sense.” With puzzling logic, she also asserts that the production treats the play with “no embellishments, no untoward fuss,” an approach she disarmingly suggests “should be a plus in a well-made play. . . .” Her clear bias toward realism and period fidelity is evident.

In her review of “Bus Stop,” she singles out the “period perfect” set for praise and rhapsodizes over its “full appointments . . . a telephone pole and patch of sky above the roof, softly falling snow and evidence of gale-force winds rattling the diner door.”

The attractions of such full-blown realism (to producers as well as critics) are beyond question, but the history of the modern stage production may be read as the record of the attempt to subvert, explode, transform, demystify and even banish such conventions--ironically, the product of an aesthetic Ibsen himself helped to institute. Theater artists now know, at the end of nearly a century of anti-realist experimentation, that there are many kinds of bottles for old wine.

If, in the LATC production of “The Wild Duck,” an obviously non-realistic or impressionistic set was used, then the aim must not have been to settle for realistic “sense,” but to undermine, or play with, that very demand. One cannot criticize the production for failing to attain a standard it clearly did not strive for.

A more responsible (and responsive) review might have addressed the production’s unusual deployment of actors in space (a space created by the “effect” of the set) in terms of the impact of this deployment on the play’s action and meaning. If the set looks like “a furnished landing strip,” at some point, so be it. The question is one of intent. What was the director, an experienced and renown theater artist, after?

But Drake was unfortunately content to assume that productions of “The Wild Duck” are best served by conventional realism. No wonder she was disappointed when the production did not unilaterally comply with her expectation.

There were other troubling aspects of her review. She complains that Ron Campbell is “pretty much wasted” in his “minor role” as a drunken theologian. Is she suggesting that gifted actors should not play minor roles or that Ibsen’s smaller parts are unworthy of a director’s best efforts in casting and staging? It is excusable to want to see as much of Ron Campbell as possible, but productions, like football teams, are best served with talent at every position.

The review also complains that “director (Stein) Winge never quite got a handle on his Victorian countrymen.” These Victorian countrymen exist, of course, only as words on the page, and they can be embodied only in the present for the present. The past itself is unknowable.

The staging of a classic is always stretched between two poles of representation: the conventions and practices of the era that gave the play birth, and those of the era in which it is revived. The tension is usually invigorating and provides a reason to see the classics restaged in the first place. The director may emphasize the “pastness” of a classic, if he so chooses, or he may bring the work crashingly into the present; but either approach is purely interpretive. There are no “Victorian countrymen” to get a handle on, only a sketchy framework of theatrical conventions embedded in the text. To move beyond this framework, or even to make sense of it, is the task of the director, and his recourse must be to his imagination, not some nonexistent standard for the behavior of Victorian Norwegians.

Finally, the review asserts that the “ideas in the play are fascinating, but dated.” Besides the fact that “dated” and “fascinating” would seem to be mutually exclusive, one must wonder exactly which ideas Drake finds too irrelevant. Is it teen suicide brought about by a combination of idealism and parental rejection? Is it Ibsen’s condemnation of the power of greed? Is it his analysis of marriage? Is it the notion of an ideological zealot interfering, to tragic effect, in the personal lives of others? Ibsen’s theatrical conventions are certainly not timely--classics are always dated in that sense--but it is hard to defend (and Drake doesn’t) the notion that Ibsen’s ideas have lost their currency.

Criticism is a difficult trade, and Sylvie Drake is one of our most experienced reviewers, but L.A.’s theaters struggle in difficult and unsettling times and deserve more than unexamined assumptions and careless reasoning.

See letters to Counterpunch, F6.