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.

Rear Window

Should artists be called on to solve murders? In the classic romantic conception, the artist is an outsider, a wounded soul whose recompense is the pleasure of creation. While others live their lives, the artistic personality derives pleasure from recording it. Everything is gris for the mill. What’s painful for others is merely a diary entry and if beauty is truth as the poet says, then artists who are natural voyeurs and whose one degree of separation confers on them a certain objectivity surely make good detectives. This is the case for L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) in Rear Window, which is one of today’s offerings in the current Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum. "Jeff" is a photojournalist who’s been put out of commission by a broken leg. The injury sets up the story line, but we are given hints that the wound is symbolic of something more profound that has always sidelined him. Now with his ability to get around impaired, he has nothing to do but look out his window at the lives of others. Urban settings are filled with windows that are like televisions screens, but it’s as if Jeff were on an acid trip watching reality TV. Jeff's fiancé Lisa (Grace Kelly) whose only problem is that she’s everything a man could possibly want (she arrives with lobster from “21”)recedes before him as he becomes captivated by a pair of newlyweds, who are constantly pulling down their shades and a Miss Lonelyheart (Judith Evelyn), a lonely young woman who serves candlelit dinners to imaginary male callers. Rear Window takes place during a New York Heat wave and we even have a couple sleeping out on their fire escape with an alarm clock. Among the cast of characters is a convalescing woman (Irene Winston) and her husband Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) who chops her into little pieces. Stella (Thelma Ritter) the nurse sent by Jeff's insurance company is there to help him with his leg, but she’s really the resident shrink. In a Greek tragedy she’d have been the seer. “We’ve become a race of peeping toms,” she tells Jeff. “People ought to go out of each other’s house and look in.” Significantly many of the people who Jeff is spying on are suffering from a complementary disorder They’re exhibitionists to his voyeur. Jeff shares his Greenwich Village courtyard (which resembles bohemian redoubts like Patchin Place, the home of both E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes) with Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) a ballerina who parades around in her underwear, a temperamental musician (Ross Bagdasian) who drunkenly swipes his scores off his keyboard and a sunbathing sculptress. Besides manifesting opposing spectrums of the same pathology Jeff and his subjects, at least initially, are united in the pursuit of art at the expense of life, which may account for the fact that though the courtyard is reminiscent of the Village, it also exudes the artificiality of a stage set. Rear Window like North by Northwest and Strangers on a Train, is a thriller that’s also a romantic comedy and there's something almost Shakespearean about the way it flips so effortlessly from tragedy to comedy, from hi to lo. The problems Jeff and his esthetically inclined friends have with life are resolved faster than you can ask, who done it?

House of Mirth

In Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth, Dreiser and Wharton created heroines that were the cosmopolitan equivalent of Emma Bovary. Self-hatred and aspiration—in short the desire to escape—were the driving forces behind characters like Lily Bart and Carrie Meeber. The seeds of the urban megalopolis had an effect on the romantic imagination that was equivalent to a drought feeding a brush fire. The industrial revolution, with its vast accumulations of wealth leading to both pleasure palaces and eventually to museums like the Morgan Library and the Frick, created a buffet of prospects that became the palette of self-invention. Decades later, in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, “Brazilian marching powder” would become the drug that fuels ascent, much the way the cocktail of power and money became the drug of choice for Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities. Voyeurism is part of the life of the modern city. As in Rear Window, we all become material witnesses to both crimes and unattainable delights. We are all inadvertent spies as we awaken in the morning and go to sleep at night with views of huge high rises, their facades like little prosceniums in which we witness the despair and exultation of strangers. Ezra Pound famously said, “make it new,” and in a city like New York, the magnetism lies in the perverse notion that there is always something new under the sun that becomes more sought after the more ineluctable it is, and the more it holds the prospect of something that is in danger of being missed. That which doesn’t exist is always more appealing than those people and things whose parameters we know. Said more succinctly, familiarity breeds contempt—an emotion that Anna Karenina also knew something about.