Codependent Yes More

Photograph of Hendrik Ibsen by Gustav Borgen

Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring For Yourself  is one of the bibles of the recovery movement and it reflects a sentiment that's a product of an age in which the jargon by which some relationships end is an assertion of psychic real estate, “I need my own space.” Everyone wants to be free to maximize their potential (it’s virtually an epidemic) and dependency is looked at as a straightjacket that inhibits individual growth. But actually dependency can be loads of fun. If Codependent No More sold millions of copies, the anti-Christ for dependedaphobes might be CoDependent Yes More. One of the basic tenets of such a volume might be that being entwined and enmeshed produces shared memory and experience. Today many married couples live separate lives. There are many couples who see each other less than people who simply date. Everyone is so busy fulfilling their potential that they have no time for each other. Nothing is deemed more horrible than one person sacrificing their chance to be the person they always wanted to be for the sake of the relationship. But is being the person you always wanted to be always so great. As far back as the l9th Century, Henrik Ibsen realized that self-realization could be a two edged sword. A Doll’s House shows the negative side of co-dependency, but Ibsen seemed to become chastened by his own experience. Later plays like The Master Builder are ambivalent towards the search. Striving for greatness, which can be the obverse of self-hatred, is not always what it’s cracked up to be. Solness, the creative who is the hero of Ibsen’s Master Builder who seeks to build “castles in the sky,” also resembles Icarus whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.

Joss Whedon’s "Much Ado About Nothing"

Joss Whedon of The Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame has directed a film version of Much Ado About Nothing that's received critical plaudits, and rightfully so. Though the setting is entirely modern with one of the supernumeraries cast as an in house photographer, Shakespeare’s classic figures, the headstrong and the well defended Beatrice (Amy Acker) who loves with “an enraged affection,” and Benedick who declares “’till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace,” are still as Shakespeare had them, charmingly combative and two sides of he same coin. This is not a Shakespeare for our times, but for all time and the contemporaneity exists to facilitate the reading of the text, in such a way that at times you forget you are seeing Shakespeare. The words are there, but any hint of archness is gone and you begin to relate to Shakespearean dialogue the way you would to everyday speech. Whedon’s Much Ado is not the kind of Shakespeare in modern dress that we’ve seen where the plays are interpreted so that we recognize them as allegories of modern angst, as was the case with Peter’s Brook’s l962 production of King Lear, influenced by Jan Kott’s famous essay “King Lear or Endgame.” In this regard the Whedon’s Much Ado achieves the kind of intimacy with a classic text that Andre Gregory, Louis Malle and Wally Shawn did in the film of  Vanya on 42nd Street and Gregory and Shawn are doing in their long awaited production of The Master Builder (some scenes of which were previewed in the recent Andre: Gregory Before and After Dinner). Whedon’s Much Ado makes you laugh and cry and is a reminder that it’s still possible to lose yourself in a Shakespearean text.

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.”

O Quebec I: The Northeast Kingdom

 Photo by Hallie Cohen

Travel up I-89 past White River Junction and Montpelier, Vermont’s capital city, and then off through well-heeled ski villages like Stowe up towards the Canadian border and you enter what is known as the Northeast Kingdom. The words conjure Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, or Disney’s Magic Kingdom, and you can’t help thinking of Heart of Darkness, as the supermarket chains are replaced by old general stores, followed by miles of houses that seem to have left the present behind, including some whose roofs have imploded. You become aware of the frequent “Moose Crossing” signs, and even think you might run into some extinct species of animal. The roads become more winding and mountainous and the population more intermittent. The world is quieter in the Northeast Kingdom. You don’t see too many Escalades or Mercedes, and you don’t hear too many loud sounds, besides those of birds. The lawn mowers and hedge cutters honing topiaries are not part of this sight and soundscape. The Northeast Kingdom is like the late work of an Ibsen or Shakespeare—there is something ethereal and almost refined about its heights. Like Solness in The Master Builder, you ascend to a “castle in the sky” that is somewhere between destitution and heaven.