A Match Made in Hell

“Play Strindberg” is definitely not a Strindberg play. Friedrich Durrenmatt took the situation and characters of August Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” and upended the gloom, if not the doom.

The difference is announced at the start of Hope Alexander’s staging at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage. The contenders in this marital bout are introduced as actual boxers, posing for the crowd as the announcer describes them in flamboyant terms, while lights flash and a crowd roars. The corners of the stage are the corners of a boxing ring. Bells demarcate the 12 “rounds.”

As in “Dance of Death,” Edgar and Alice have endured 25 years of a hellish marriage on a desolate island outpost, a situation that might change with a visit from Alice’s cousin and former lover Kurt. But Durrenmatt’s central duo isn’t completely miserable. These two take a degree of satisfaction from every feint that connects. They relish their ability to survive the incessant psychological battering they get from each other. The audience experiences the guilty pleasure of laughing along with, and at, these creatures, as they try to spit in the face of their dire condition.

Much of the comedy stems from a broad and bravura performance by Hal Landon Jr. as Edgar--a lean, mean master clown.

Landon’s funniest scene is a wordless solo turn. While Alice and Kurt make love offstage, erroneously believing that they’ve fooled her husband, Edgar himself greedily devours a meal that Alice thought she had hidden from him. Landon eats with such sloppy gusto that this scene becomes a riotous primer in extracting laughter from a mundane activity. The vitality he displays as he slurps his soup--or, earlier in the play, as he purrs in anticipation at any mention of food--indicates how far Durrenmatt strayed from Strindberg’s abject despair.

Most of the time, Edgar is hardly silent. He often reminds everyone that he’s a distinguished military man of letters. He wrote the standard ballistics text--or at least, he had that status until he was superseded by a recent upstart. He also takes great pride in his fancy plumed hat and sword. In other words, he plays soldier, using the trappings of warfare for his own amusement, much as Durrenmatt converts Strindberg’s deep bitterness into comedy.

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Edgar’s games are interrupted, however, by momentary lapses of consciousness. Some of these are at least partially rigged so that he can spy on his wife, but others are the real thing. Edgar’s health is failing, and Landon’s eyes sometimes betray his panic. But he can still dance his cherished dance of the boyars. Ludicrous though it may look, this wild, thrashing dance is a testament not only to Edgar’s will to keep going but also to the intense physicality of Landon’s swashbuckling performance.

In diametrical contrast to Landon’s Jack Sprat look is Martha McFarland’s Alice, a woman whose girth was probably seen as a sign of affluence in the late 19th century culture of this couple. McFarland uses her ample physiognomy to telling comic effect as she sneers at Edgar or expresses dismay over one of his successful jabs. But she’s never as ridiculous as her husband. McFarland makes clear that Alice will ultimately win the title.

At first, Don Took’s Kurt looks like little more than fresh meat for the sharks. It was Kurt, years ago, who introduced Edgar and Alice, and so he unwittingly bears part of the responsibility for their quarter-century of combat. Each combatant considers how Kurt--or Kurt’s offstage ex-wife--can be used to humiliate the other. Kurt tries to be a voice of reason, but he’s soon dragged into the muck.

Took is a fine foil as he spars with the belligerent Edgar and assesses Alice’s advances. But he appears unsure of how to handle the play’s weakest scene, a convoluted ending that hinges on a transformation of Kurt and tries to make explicit some of the work’s broader social implications. Likewise, Angela Balogh Calin’s backdrop of Giacometti-like figures emerging from behind bars may have been intended to reinforce the wider modernity of Durrenmatt’s approach, but such underlining is unnecessary and even superfluous.

These are minor reservations. South Coast presented the West Coast premiere of “Play Strindberg” in 1973, with Landon and Took playing the same roles, when they were surely too young. It’s gratifying to see the company revisit the play years later, when the same actors can offer an enlarged perspective.

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* “Play Strindberg,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends April 11. $26-$43. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Hal Landon Jr.: Edgar

Martha McFarland: Alice

Don Took: Kurt

Written by Friedrich Durrenmatt. Directed by Hope Alexander. Set by Angela Balogh Calin. Costumes by Alex Jaeger. Lighting by Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz. Sound by Max Kinberg. Stage manager Jamie A. Tucker.