Ivo van Hove’s “Scenes From a Marriage"

At the time of it’s original release in l974 Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage was the perfect antidote to the wave of post-modernism which hovered like a horrible tsunami, threatening to place the iteration of most emotional states in quotes. Ivo van Hove’s stage version at New York Theatre Workshop has the same net effect as the movie, which is to place you right in the line of fire—in this case of an unsettling portrait of human bonding. There have been three recent adaptations of Bergman movies for the theater. Carey Mulligan starred in Jenny Worton’s staging of Through a Glass Darkly.That production seemed like little more than an inspired read through of the script. Van Hove did a Cries and Whispers at BAM, which might have surpassed the movie, playing upon the conceit of our culture’s obsession with self-recording. In his current adaptation of Scenes from a Marriage van Hove plays upon the idea of duplication. The audience is divided up into three separate groups who witness and overhear Bergman’s couple Johan and Marianne played by three different sets of actors. It’s like cubism. The chronology of a relationship is broken by having it portrayed by three couples instead of one. Modern man is both thin skinned and lives behind thin walls in glass high rises where he can see and hear his neighbors(there is a little bit of Rear Window too in van Hove’s choreography). Thus as couple number #1 argues about aborting a child, you hear in the background another iteration of them arguing and Marianne saying, “There’s more to life than sex. If you’re not happy find yourself someone more exciting.” Our experience of these overlays also correlates to the inner life of characters who seem like they are hearing scripts playing over and over again in their heads. A sidelight to this is the constant marital strife and gossip of breakups which is the palette of discourse. This is beautifully orchestrated in one scene where schadenfreude about the vitriol between a visiting couple, Katrina (Carmen Zilles) and Peter (Erin Gann) prefigures Marianne and Johan’s own impending implosion. The theme of inexorable longing is a leitmotif that runs through van Hove’s production. If his Johans and Mariannes are duplicable and all the more haunting for the ways in which most couples will recognize themselves in them, they constitute a class whose existence is predicated on treating life as a commodity suffering from planned obsolescence and in need of  constant upgrading. The above has been a description of Act I of the production. Act II in which all three couples are on the stage at the same time, is a little like taking the cubist landscape and flattening it out, in this case by turning the action into Greek tragedy. The talented Mariannes (Susannah Flood, Roslyn Ruff, Tina Benko) and Johans (Alex Hurt, Dallas Roberts, Arliss Howard) are turned into the chorus. It’s amusing at first and certainly a change of pace, but the novelty of hearing domestic complaints rendered like Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus wears thin, producing tedium and predictability in place of the powerful and at times bracing cacophony that constituted the first act of the play.

Longines DolceVita

Gloria Perkins the sexy American actress (played by Dorothy De Poliolo) is back. If you recall she lured Sandro (Gabriel Ferzetti) away from Claudia (Monica Vitti) in Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Wherever Gloria goes she causes rioting by horny Italian men and if you follow Longines DolceVita campaign (in which Kate Winslet appears, along with Bollywood’s Aiswarya Rai) her persona is attracting a gaggle of paparazzi too. Yes it’s actually Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that the sequence is alluding to, but the memory of the scenes Gloria created is also at work. Advertising can be extremely irritating, especially the kind that you see mixed in with previews at your local quadruplex. But it’s comforting to know that scenes from great Italian classics, like L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita still reside in the collective memory of the culture, if only to sell a watch or bottle of perfume. Another recent commercial for Louis Vuitton, for instance, featured a masked ball that recalled  Eyes Wide Shut. Commercials and music videos require a very high level of film artistry—since they have to communicate a good deal of information in a very short period of time. The juxtaposition between a memory and a product is often an example of simple filmic montage, executed with the high production values that commercials require. However, what's next? Will a scene from Bergman’s Cries and Whispers appear as a plug for Obamacare?  Will Fellini’s circus characters from 8 ½ be used to advertise Six Flags? Commerce and art can often sometimes be strange, but effective bedfellows.

Powder Her Face

The expression “Where’s the Beef” was made famous by Wendy’s. In the New York City Opera production of Thomas Ades and Phillip Henscher’s Powder Her Face, which recently played at BAM, the promiscuous Duchess of Argyll (mezzo-soprano Alison Cook) calls out “I want some beef…bring me meat…fill me up...anything you have.” The humor lies in the fact that her luxurious hotel suite is filled with naked men, though it’s the room service waiter who is the recipient of the blow job. If nothing else Powder Her Face makes up for an imbalanced and unfair condition where more female actresses take off their clothes on stage and film than men. In one scene the creators of the opera have created a parity. And while, the homoerotic scene is more reminiscent of Eakins’ famous painting “The Swimming Hole" than of a fast food joint, the subject of the opera derives from another piece of mass culture, tabloid journalism. Powder Her Face, on the one hand, seems to exist for the mise en scene. It’s an exercise in style and is the latest in a number of BAM productions (Cries and Whispers, Roman Tragedies, House/Divided) which employ video as part of its dramatic palette. Yet there’s something unsettling that’s hard to totally get one’s hands around. Call it Look Back in Anger in reverse. Old fashioned class warfare is the lingua franca of the opera. Lady Argyll’s maid, played both lubriciously and aerobically by Nili Riemer in an iconic red wig, dreams only of wealth while Margaret Campbell, the duchess, is the rich man’s Jimmy Porter; her lurid sexuality makes her an easy target for the middle class who end up dispossessing her of her title and her wealth. So despite all the irony Powder Her Face conforms to one of the tenets of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the “fall from grace” of a person of “high status.”  

Roman Tragedies at BAM

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Ivo van Hove loves the video camera. In last year’s dramatization of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers by the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, of which he is general director, the dying sister records her own death. In Roman Tragedies, the adaptation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, which just concluded a short run at BAM, he takes his preoccupation with a culture fixated on recording itself to new heights. The audience freely wanders onto the stage which is filled with video monitors while those who remaining in their seats are always guaranteed at least one degree of separation from the drama by watching the videography (which now includes their confreres) on a scrim. Audience members are also free to tweet (with computers provider especially for the purpose) and naturally to photograph the production and one another. Competing with the Shakespeare are current news stories which also play on the monitors—Hurricane Sandy, the Gaza situation, the Olympics—and itinerant televised events such as, for example, a number of Manny Pacquiao fights (van Hove is obviously a fan). The Roman Tragedies is techno-cubism and it bears a resemblance Marianne Weems’ House/Divided which recently played at BAM and which toggled between The Grapes of Wrath and the Bank of America/Country Wide Financial scandal also by using video projections. Cubism created a visual synchronicity with perspective eschewed and visual imagery given equal valence on a flattened plane. Techno-cubism similarly democratizes its palette of information. History and culture are all digitalized and turned into bytes that compete for our attention and the major criticism of the production might be that Shakespeare gets bumped by more arresting bits of news. Jan Kott wrote a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary which influenced famous avant-garde productions in the 60’s and 70’s. Roman Tragedies is Shakespeare Our Contemporary to the tenth power. And there are times amidst all the sound and fury of actors mixing with audience members on stage and leering at violent outbursts the way people stare at accidents that you long for an old fashioned proscenium in which the words and poetry of Shakespeare don't have to compete with all of recorded history. Van Hove makes the audience a part of things, but there is a curious disconnect which might be explained by the rarefied opportunities for catharsis. 

Cries and Whispers at BAM

Last summer Carey Mulligan starred in what amounted to a staged reading of the Bergman script Through a Glass Darkly. The Flemish director’s Ivo van Hove’s Cries and Whispers is as much a transformation of Bergman as say Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was of Shakespeare. Bergman was firmly the artist in control of his characters in his original movie. In van Hove’s adaptation his dying character is the artist, creating in this case a multi-media (video and painting) rendition of her own death. Where Cries and Whispers might have recalled Chekhov’s Three Sisters in the powerful relationships created, van Hove’s work is reminiscent of the artist Hannah Wilke’s documentation of her own demise. Pictures are constantly being generated and remind us that we are a culture of image collectors. The collecting of the images takes the place of memory and even contains an element of wishful thinking. If we are too busy recording ourselves will there be no time to die? What are we humans going to do with all the pictures we ceaselessly take? That is not a question van Hove is asking, but it’s a good question to ask in a digital age in which pictures are so facilely rendered that there will never be enough hours in anyone’s life to see them all. The first half of the current production is literally disembodied even as the dying Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) is figuratively disemboweled. But the further away it drifts from Bergman’s narrative the closer it comes to the spirit of the great master and there is one scene between Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Helena Reijn) which has the dramatic power of Persona. Bergman's Cries and Whispers employed intense colors (in particular red, white and black) and to that extent was a product of its time. The narcissistic self recording which characterizes van Hove's Cries and Whispers is what makes the current production timely. Be prepared besides an Alice in Wonderland set composed of projections and silhouettes this Cries and Whispers features a soundtrack highlighted by Janis Joplin singing Cry Baby.