Free Love and Subprime Mortgages

Portrait of August Strindberg by Edvard Munch

Free love was a little like subprime mortgages. It was a creation of the sixties counterculture and it’s selling point was the idea that there could be no strings attached sex between individuals. Subprime mortgages were a creation of the first decade of the twentieth century and proposed the idea that big time money could be made (by borrowers and lenders) through easily obtainable loans. It was free love financing. What the two ideas have in common is that there is no price to be paid for the pursuit of pleasure, whether it be sexual or material, even when easy money or easy sex leads to overindulgence. Lest we equate this idea with puritanical concepts of sin, here is a quote from a very non puritanical thinker, the playwright, August Strindberg who believed in determinism and would probably have found the advent of double entry bookkeeping to be tantamount in importance to if not even more important than the advent of romantic love. For Strindberg, no love was free. There was always a price to be paid. Here’s an exchange from A Dream Play, which epitomizes his attitude towards both love and real estate.

“Daughter: You are a prisoner in your own room. I have come to set you free.

  Officer: I have been       

  waiting for this, but I wasn’t sure you would want to.

  Daughter: The castle is strong—it has seven walls—but it shall be done. Do you want to be set free-  

  --or not?   

  Officer: To tell the truth, I don’t know. Either way I’ll suffer. Every joy has to be paid for twice over        with sorrow. It’s wretched here, but I’d have to endure three time the agony for the joys of freedom...”

The Furies

photo of Paul Theroux by Rupal Agrawal

You’ve read and witnessed the putative subject of Paul Theroux’s recent New Yorker short story “The Furies” too many times. A dentist Ray Testa, who is 58, leaves his wife Angie, to run off with his 31year-old hygienist, Shelby. At the wedding he announces, “I now belong to an incredibly exclusive club. There are not many men who can say that they’re older than their father-n-law.” The story is blunt and almost graceless like the character it describes and it sports none of the lyrical sorties of the Cheever/Updike generation but the territory of suburban infidelity is naturally a subject that those writers addressed in the pages of The New Yorker generations before. However, the landscape seamlessly changes. Proud of his conquest, Ray insists that Shelby attend his high school reunion in the town of Medford where he’s grown up. The title of the story conjures Greek mythology, but what transpires is Scrooge’s nightmare of retribution set in a Strindbergian reality. Ray’s high school girlfriends exact a kind of poetic justice that hounds him out of the smug satisfaction of his pleasure principle. The brilliance of the writing lies in the way it insouciantly negotiates a territory that could have been a dream were it not reality--with nary a touch of narrative or verbal pyrotechnics. “The Furies" ends as predictably as it began, with Ray losing everything and learning nothing. He hears about his first wife’s death from a patient. Then Shelby goes. “She did not divorce him at once. She demanded a house, and he provided it. She asked for severance pay from her job, and got it. They spoke through lawyers, until it was final, and he was alone.” The beauty and simplicity are surgical, purgative and well nigh mythical. It takes your breath away.

Dark Horse

In his New York Times review A. O. Scott compared the character of Abe (Justin Gelber) in Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse to Willy Loman. Actually a better comparison might be Strindberg and characters like Miss Julie who are trapped by everything they are biologically, sociologically and morphologically. The title of the movie comes from Abe’s position in his family. Still in his 30’s he’s an overweight college dropout who lives at home and works in the family business. His father Jackie (Christopher Walken) is a narcoleptic suburban realtor who is constantly demanding spread sheets. One long shot of Jackie going over rent rolls with his visionless mercantilism paints a character that is about as about as far from Gary Cooper’s portrait of the architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as it’s possible to get. Abe’s mother Phyllis (Mia Farrow) preens over him and apologizes for his ineptitude while offering a rather dire prognosis of his prospects. His older brother Richard (Justin Bartha) is a successful doctor in a competitive Jewish family—in other words everything he is not. Richard is gay and Abe blames his brother for having abandoned him ten years before for having gone off to Fire Island instead of accompanying him on a cross country trip. Solondz’s family is garish, but there is also a tenderness to the portrayal. Abe is trapped in himself and the victim of a confluence of factors that transcend just bourgeois values. There are all kinds of brilliant touches in the film. One of Abe’s first lines to Miranda (Selma Blair), the catatonic woman he proposes to after one date, is “I never dance. It’s not my thing.” It’s all down hill from there. “I want to want you,” she tells him later in the movie. “That’s enough for me,” Abe enthusiastically responds. Abe’s signature vehicle a Hummer and he gets into a fight in a store, whose Toys "R"Us logo is intentionally blurred (one would suppose that the toy chain didn’t want their logo associated with the production), when he tries to return a scratched action figure. As Abe’s life finally implodes entirely, the movie turns from Strindbergian determinism to Walter Mitty like fantasy. Dark Horse is a mess that gives a new meaning to the word mordant, but outrageously funny too. One wouldn’t be surprised to find Solondz transforming the scene of Oedipus with his eyes plucked out into a sequel to Animal House. Tragedy turned to farce. That’s the unique and sometimes frigid sensibility at work.

Burning

Thomas Bradshaw’s “Burning” just closed. You didn’t miss anything unless you'd like to see a gay actor named Jack (Andrew Garman), who plays Banquo and is in charge of admissions at a prestigious performing arts high school having sex with a 14 year old boy, Chris (Evan Johnson), whose mother has just died of a drug overdose and whose paternity issues are epitomized by the fact that his favorite play is Strindberg’s The Father. The actor lives with a producer named Simon (Danny Mastrogiorgio) and the two have sex with the boy (incidentally also an applicant at the performing arts high school) and eventually employ him as a butler while introducing him to Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. Simon has cast Jack in a one man monologue about a pedophile who buys a six year old girl in a Cambodian brothel and brings her back to the States where he turns her into a pageant queen. You still didn’t miss anything unless you would like to see a black painter named Peter (Stephen Tyrone Williams) who does such a good job of hiding his race that a group of German neo-Nazis believe his depictions of Klan rallies are arguments for white supremacy (Peter is also unique in the fact that he has never had sex with a black woman—a situation that Bradshaw’s play rectifies when Peter falls in love with a Sudanese prostitute who reminds him of the recently deceased cousin Lucy he’d spent his life avoiding). One of the neo-Nazis has a handicapped sister who appears half nude on stage. She takes fiber for constipation, likes to quote Emily Dickinson and allows her brother to afford her “release” in the bathtub. You still didn’t miss anything unless you are interested in a total of three mothers who die of drug overdoses with a fourth killed in a car crash, a theater producer who pretends to be gay in order to get work and an aspiring heterosexual teenager whose first sexual experience with a hermaphrodite introduces him to the fact that he might not be what he thinks. You didn’t miss anything unless you like lots of characters who strip themselves bare both literally and metaphorically. You didn’t miss anything unless you enjoy satire whose backbone is back story. Macbeth's "life's...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,signifying nothing,” is quoted during a self-congratulatoryand histrionic eulogy after which the remains from two separate urns are mixed together with Elton John’s “Your Song” playing in the background. But aren't the famous lines precisely what great satire is all about?

Through a Glass Darkly

Ingmar Bergman was a student of August Strindberg. Jenny Worton’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Through A Glass Darkly, presented by the Atlantic Theater Company, makes a great movie into what feels like a Strindberg play. The play is remarkably faithful to the movie, with all of the keynote scenes appearing like signposts: the return of the mediocre novelist (Chris Sarandon) with sad, last-minute presents (a shaver, gloves, watch) purchased at the airport; the discovery by the novelist’s daughter of his diary, in which she reads, in reference to her own madness, “observe its process and her descent;” the culminating scene of incest. Carey Mulligan, the young British actress who received much praise for her work in The Seagull on Broadway and in the 2009 film, An Education, plays the disturbed young woman, emphasizing both her withdrawal and a countervailing sexuality that blurs the boundaries between herself and others. Art, madness and God (the title derives from Corinthians) are the prevailing themes of the film, and it was Bergman’s brilliance to defy any of the facile connections among the varying set pieces having to do with the desire for greatness, schizophrenia and the search for meaning in a world where God appears only as a hallucination. The play, like the movie, is a series of missed connections in which the tragedy lies in helplessness and isolation, with no revelation explaining or solving anything. Unlike the movie, however, the play falls short in its rather clichéd depiction of Karin’s illness through swishy sounding voices. But why turn the movie into a play in the first place? However admirable the homage to a masterpiece, it’s all-too-obvious that the current production is overshadowed by the film. The Oedipal overtones, as they relate to competing works of art in two different media, might have amused Bergman who divided his time between theater and film.

John Gabriel Borkman

One could have joked that there was some sort of structural damage to BAM’s Harvey Theater, and that the damage became the set for the Abbey Theater’s production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. The snow and ice that New Yorkers have seen quite a bit of lately was as ubiquitous on the stage as it was outside, particularly in Brooklyn. Blinding snow is indeed a fitting image for the agon that is described between the title character (Alan Rickman), who excuses the financial transactions that have destroyed so many lives by saying that he wanted to achieve the power to make other people happy, and the universe. Borkman, according to the woman he has thrown off, Ella Rentheim (Lindsay Duncan), is guilty of another crime, “the murder of love in a human being,” in that he has sacrificed her love, given her up for the sake of his ambition. The play begins with Borkman’s wife Gunhilde (Fiona Shaw) saying, “People like us have no time for happiness.” And happiness becomes the lingua franca of the play. When Borkman’s son Erhart (Marty Rea) brings it up as the goal to which he aspires, his mother mockingly asks him where he thinks he will find this so called happiness (the burden of parental wishes is yet another theme of the play). And what is the relationship of happiness to aspiration? In late Ibsen plays, imagination is always juxtaposed to reality. In The Master Builder, Solness’s muse Hilda pushes him to make “castles in the sky.” Isn’t the imperfect nature of reality always at odds with the perfect world that the imagination creates? The start of John Gabriel Borkman presents a compelling metaphor: imagination held prisoner. Borkman, convicted of his crimes, sentenced and now released and in exile in his own home, walks back and forth in his room as the clock ticks. Ibsen introduces us to his character through the sound of his footsteps. Ibsen’s characters could be artists or dictators in the monomaniacal way they subsume humanity to ideas. Both Strindberg and Ibsen influenced Bergman, and one is reminded of the harrowing picture of the artist in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, sacrificing the sanity of his abandoned children to his ambition for greatness. 

Creditors

“You’re supposed to be my wife and I’m supposed to be your husband, and there is a difference between these roles,” the husband Adolph (Tom Burke) says in the current Donmar Warehouse production of Creditors at BAM. Adolph then goes on to accuse his wife Tekla (Anna Chancellor) of treating him like a creditor who makes these very obligations feel like debts that are being called in. It’s a theme that is reiterated as through a kaleidoscope throughout the play. At one moment, Tekla is described as having such a fully formed sensibility that Adolph has never been able to put his imprint on her; in another, he has created her, exhausted himself bolstering her fragile, self-critical ego to the point where he has sacrificed his career as an artist in order to allow her to flourish as a novelist. There is one astonishingly sensual scene in the production (directed by Alan Rickman), which mines the wellsprings of Strindberg’s precocious irony. It occurs when Tekla, returning after an absence, acts out the wantonness that Adolph has irresolutely tried to create in his sculpture of her that sits at center stage. Logic is the scale on which Strindberg plays his dramatic music, a logic that might be looked at as ideational were it not so perfectly evocative of the workings of self-reflexive consciousness—not only thinking, but thinking about thinking. Beyond the war between sexes and the fragile nature of self definition that obviously attracted Ingmar Bergman to Strindberg (could we ever imagine Scenes From a Marriage without the great Strindberg discussions on male and female sexuality?), it is the mind turning against itself that is the great subject of Strindberg’s work, and the territory that the current production at BAM so beautifully underlines. This is one production you don’t want to miss.