“Uh-oh,” I murmur to my companion. “It looks like this is going to be Solness on the Beach.” The curtain has not yet opened, but in front of it projects a square white platform adorned with a severe dark bench. Pure Robert Wilson. When the curtain parts, my suspicion is confirmed. Ibsen has indeed been Wilsonized by director Kate Whoriskey, Wilson’s apparent acolyte, at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. There, ranged behind glass booths, counting into microphones, are Master Builder Solness’s staff, the vulnerable bookkeeper Kaja, the feckless young architect Ragnar, and Ragnar’s ailing draftsman father. Rigid in right-angle profile, Kaja rhythmically turns her ledger pages with a snap and counts, over and over, “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight.”
But let me hasten to add that even at this early moment, I warily welcome this shameless homage to Wilson’s formalism, given the even greater wariness with which I approach—of all Ibsen’s plays—a realistic production of The Master Builder. The egotistical, unbalanced Solness is one problem, his ecstatic muse Hilde Wangel—the strange, independent young woman who has materialized from his past—is another, but the biggest problem is the end of the last act. There, Solness is to crown his career by carrying a dedicatory wreath to the top of the impossibly tall tower he has just constructed. Hilde has excitedly urged him to climb it. But it seems Solness is terrified of heights. The ascent unfolds between the two of them as a kind of folie a deux. That a scene should be so over-determined, like a German Fate Tragedy, and at the same time so unbearably corny (an anxious group gazes offstage, crying out in fear, and then, THEN…!) is a kind of double jeopardy no audience should have to endure. It is a harder scene to stage, if that were possible, than the avalanche that concludes Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken. And, in truth, even Wilson himself, on the same stage eight years ago, failed to carry that off.
But soon the strength of Whoriskey’s direction, moment to moment, pushes these concerns from my mind. This is no by-the-numbers Wilson production; rather the sculpted staging forms a rigid container around a molten core, a kind of—in the generic sense—abstract expressionism. Kaja (Aysan Celik) trembles and almost swoons with the sexual passion Solness stirs in her, all the while holding herself together like a steel rod. As Solness’s death-chilled wife Aline, in perpetual mourning more for the incinerated family doll collection than her two children who perished as a result of a fire on her family estate years ago, Sharon Scruggs moves like one of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, but speaks with a sepulchered intensity that would make the Ghost from Hamlet appear positively sunny. An emblem of her de-animation is the automated cage, a see-through elevator, that set designer Christine Jones contrived to carry her on and off stage.
Christopher McCann, admired by New York audiences for, among many roles, a recent performance as the corrupt DeFlores in Robert Woodruff’s production of The Changeling, carries himself like a dangerous gas under tight confinement. He is a splendid choice for Solness. Whoriskey’s expressionistic approach is clearly marked here: When Solness tells Aline that he feels “this crushing guilt weighing me down,” we see him literally bent over like a hoop. Solness, of course, needs in Hilde Wangel a partner whose fervent, mystical power we can trust not to degenerate into Brady Bunch enthusiasm. In her case, I wish Whoriskey had carried her Strindbergian vision much further.
Though Kristin Flanders in the Wangel role is refreshingly blunt, she plays in performance what one gets from a naive reading of the play—a belief that this May creature is actually motivated by the castle-in-the-air fantasy she elaborately floats with her November seducer Solness. This may be Ibsen heresy, but I sense there is a much bolder Hilde Wangel to be wrested from this text. Suppose the Hilde Wangel who was “kissed again and again” as a young girl by Solness when he was her father’s guest in their remote northern town (this is the animating secret of their bond) were not an enabler of fantasies of renewed power and youth, but a deadly enemy, determined, if only at a preconscious level, to bring clown this sexual colonizer? Suppose she were not just sexually or spiritually “thrilled”—as the scene is always played, and was played here as well—at the prospect of Solness’s triumphant ascent, but “thrilled” (as is the adolescent Hilde Wangel in the other Ibsen play in which she appears, The Lady From the Sea) at the prospect of death—his death, thrilled at the scene she imagines of Solness’s crash down that great phallic object offstage. Now that would be a kind of reparation for his having distorted her sexuality for life just so he could indulge a momentary pederastic urge. So for me, there is still a hole in the play where some deeper fury is needed.
Nonetheless, the final scene, the one I dreaded seeing fail on the stage, is a stunning revelation. Whoriskey and lighting designer Michael Chybowski do not put the tower at some distant point offstage, leaving us to contemplate the onstage figures absurdly jumping up and down, but place it right before our eyes as a kind of Washington Monument, a great priapic rear-screen projection. The Master Builder “climbs” the tower as McCann walks straight towards us downstage with shaky limbs and terror in his eyes. The scene is harrowing. As the lighting scale shifts, the tower looms larger and larger and Solness grows smaller and smaller. Light and sound accomplish the final fall.
In his skillful adaptation, American Rep artistic director Robert Brustein cleared out all distracting underbrush in the play, like those ladies who come to visit in the final act. Whoriskey, a graduate of Brustein’s ART Institute (and, next to Peter Sellars, the youngest director ever to command the ART mainstage), was to have co-directed the production with her mentor Brustein. But like Solness himself, Brustein acceded to “youth knocking at the door,” and turned the production completely over to her. His confidence was repaid in this taut, exciting performance.
Elinor Fuchs is the author, most recently, of The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism (Indiana University Press).
