Beyond Therapy?

In a recent Times piece "Therapist and Patient Share a Theater of Hurt,” (NYT, 11/5/14), Robert J. Landy, director of N.Y.U.’s drama therapy program makes the following statement, “With certain forms of mental illness that do not respond to conventional treatment, we need a more radical approach, which therapeutic theater can provide.” That approach apparently can involve turning therapy sessions into dramatic works that sound like they could even make money. The article describes rehearsals for Borderline, a musical based on the interaction between a therapist named Cecilia Dintino and her patient, Jill Powell, an actress who appeared in “As the World Turns” and on Broadway in Grand Hotel, and Damn Yankees, but whose career had become sidelined by mental illness. One, of course, can only have sympathy for the suffering Ms. Powell has endured. Acting is no cakewalk and she wouldn’t be the first actor to  exploit their own difficulties in the service of art. The method acting technique employed by the The Actor’s Studio is based on using inner emotions and conflicts to create a character. But it’s one thing to reach inside one’s autobiography and another to titrate actual therapy into theater. If this were to become a trend it would also raise some humorous possibilities. For instance, Freudian analysis is notoriously long, longer even than the legendary long rehearsals Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory have undertaken for their productions of Vanya on 42nd Street and most recently A Master Builder.  With all the years it takes and all the silence in which the analyst says nothing, patients in Freudian analysis might contemplate the idea of producing a musical called When Will This End?  Perhaps if it were successful such a musical would amortize the cost of this notoriously expensive form of treatment. Cognitive, behavioral and interpersonal therapy would be just a few of the other therapies represented with Greenwich Village, Park Avenue and Upper West Side offices being turned into the equivalent of 42^nd Street’s theater row. No need to enroll at Juilliard or Yale, just tell it like it is. Maybe this was what Chris Durang was thinking about when he wrote Beyond Therapy?

A Master Builder

You’ve seen lots of Master Builders if you were brought up on Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism or if you are an aspiring artist or married to one—or you’re just someone who ’s interested in the darker sides of either imagination or aspiration. There are straight Victorian translations of the Ibsen classic and adaptations by playwrights who put their words in Ibsen’s mouth (as Mamet has done with Chekhov’s The Three Sisters or David Ives with Moliere’s Misanthrope). Andre Gregory’s stage adaptation with Wally Shawn playing Ibsen’s Master Builder Solness has been fourteen years in the making and it’s not The Master Builder, but A Master Builder, underlining the fact that it’s a far cry from the straight translation mode. Now we have the movie, directed by Jonathan Demme (with a screenplay by Wally Shawn), currently playing at Film Forum. Louis Malle famously filmed Vanya on 42nd Street which was the result of a similar collaboration and the style might be called vernacularization, with the impetus being to make dialogue (even in its more arch incarnations) sound like the things that people might actually say to each other. Vanya on 42^nd Street was a masterpiece, but in the case of A Master Builder using the same technique doesn't necessarily produce similar results. Perhaps the problem lies in the initial decision to introduce Solness in home hospice care with the sound of a heart monitor constantly beeping in the background. This initial set up gives the language the quality of a television soap with the melodrama revolving around Ragnar the son of Solness’s one time mentor, Knut Brovik (Andre Gregory) and Kaia (Emily Cass McDonell), Ragnar’s fiancé. Solness is afraid that Ragnar (Jeff Beihl) will surpass him just as he had once outdone Brovik. So he seduces Kaia in order to prevent Ragnar from leaving. The screenplay coops the style of Shawn’s brilliant meditation on civilization itself, The Designated Mourner with monologues masking as dialogue, but in this case to ill effect. After a while one craves what most contemporary theater directors eschew, an old-fashioned drama with characters literally walking in and out of rooms. There are some wonderful bits like Solness commenting about Kaia  “What made me imagine I’d said things to her I’d only imagined.”  And there’s the initial meeting between Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce) and Solness, which exudes the quality of a symposium in a psychoanalytic institute. Are we dealing with repressed memory syndrome or Freud’s repudiation of the seduction theory? But the lovingly worked over scenes with their occasional flashes of insight don’t cohere. They look like successions of outtakes from the long workshop that, in fact, took place. A Master Builder may be disconcerting for those who first met Shawn and Gregory in My Dinner With Andre. All the extemporization is there, but the chemistry is gone. They pull the rug out from underneath themselves by perseverating in the same approach. The urgent beeping of that heart monitor replacing Solness’ emblematic fall with flatlining doesn’t help matters either. This Solness is soulless.

The Designated Mourner

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

In Wally Shawn’s The Designated Mourner currently revived at the Public Theater, under the direction of Andre Gregory, neither Jack (Wally Shawn), self-described as “a former student of English literature who went downhill from there,” nor Judy (Deborah Eisenberg) his wife, nor Howard, Judy’s father (Larry Pine), who has written a book called The Enemy and who flies “each day on wings of scorn” talk to each other. They speak all their monologues as if the others weren’t there and what interactions that do occur are replays of scenes from the past. In one sense the very form of the play which might be subtitled Strange Interlude For Smarties tells the whole story. The Designated Mourner conforms to the Aristotelian unities to the extent that there is unity of time, place and action (the central action being the downfall of Western civilization), but the comparison to Aristotle, perhaps the greatest and most powerful symbol of the western esthetic, ends there—since in the most profound sense The Designated Mourner has no beginning, middle and end. That’s the genius of the play and its problem as it takes the form of a Socratic dialogue/monologue that could go on forever. What are the subjects? Them and us (“the disemboweling of the overboweled”), hi and lo brow, and most particularly the nature of the self. At one point Jack has an affair with Peg, a girl who operates a lemonade stand. “Jack I love you,” she says. “Is she talking about me,” Jack remarks. “My name rang oddly in my ears.” Of course the disembodied self is a theme that might have appeared in Beckett, albeit with different syntax. If The Designated Mourner were a horror film, then Oedipus would have been the creature that Dr. Frankenstein created. The first half of the play is all about triangulation in both its sexual and historical forms with the second “act,” which suffers from its share of redundancy, having to do with the downfall of the Holy Trinity of Howard, Jack and Judy,  as Western Civilization meets it’s maker. The father dies just in time for the son to lose his hard-on. “My dick lay limply in my trousers like a lunch packed by mother,” Jack comments, as he relieves himself of Judy and relieves himself (and defecates) on a volume of John Donne’s poetry. 

The Master Builder at BAM

If you didn’t know Ibsen’s The Master Builder you might at first think that the character played by John Turturro in the current production at BAM was someone who had an exaggerated sense of his self-importance. In fact, Turturro’s Solness bears an unpleasant resemblance to another architect. Robert Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, rendered by Gary Cooper in the King Vidor movie. And if we were looking for referents in contemporary culture then the sexualization of Solness’s muse Hilde Wangel (Wrenn Schmidt) and his amanuensis Kaja Fosli (Kelly Hutchinson) could easily recall Fifty Shades of Gray. Of course a helluva lot more is going on in both the play and in Andrei Belgrader’s direction, but there’s something in Ibsen that conduces to the kind of distortion that sees the romantic conception of the uncompromising artist as form of bombast and tyranny, with those surrounding him as submissives. The play can easily be turned into The Masturbator rather than The Master Builder. The very name Solness, the state of “soul ness,” sounds like an iteration from one of the great German idealist philosophers. When you step into late Ibsen, you enter the world of aspiration, in which being is trumped by the notion of becoming, and happiness is the price one pays to create  “castles in the air”—the expression Hilde uses to describe her master builder’s calling. The German word for passion is Leidenschaft and leiden means suffering, a kind of suffering that can lead to the ultimate sacrifice, the famous Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. The recently released Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner contains scenes for a work in progress of The Master Builder that has been going on for years. It reveals another approach to the play, based upon conversation and devoid of hyperbole. Freed from the burden of melodrama, Ibsen’s play becomes as complex as say a Bergman movie.

Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner

One of the many pleasures of Cindy Kleine’s documentary about her husband Andre Gregory, which recently previewed at Film Forum (it’s opening there on April 3rd), is watching the ongoing rehearsal of Wallace Shawn’s translation of The Master Builder. The rehearsal radiates retrospectively over the entire film, encapsulating Gregory with some degree of irony and a great deal of seriousness under the blanket of Ibsen’s masterpiece about the artistic personality. Gregory has always been Shawn’s master builder creating the parameters for Shawn’s quirky teleology. It’s apparent that Shawn’s famous tete a tete with Gregory dictates the style of both Vanya on 42nd Street and The Master Builder—which are conversational in the best sense of the word. Kleine’s direction lovingly captures her husband’s facial expressions and in particular his hands as they react to intimate directorial moments, but her film fundamentally embraces Gregory by paying homage to his esthetic. After all it's called Andrew Gregory: Before and After Dinner and it’s more my dinner with Andre than My Dinner with Andre could ever be (after she eats with him all the time). Besides the extent to which the film is about a host of Gregory’s interests that range from shamanism to the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, there is the drama of history. Gregory’s father was a Jew who left Russia before Stalin, escaped Germany while remaining curiously connected to influential Nazis, and brought his family to America from England on the last boat, departing on the eve of the bombing of Britain—something that may account for
Gregory's love of ocean liners, but does little to shed light on the question of his father’s enigmatic character. “You can’t go back,” is the filmmaker’s final word on he subject. “Access Denied. Where Andre found his father was in his work.”