What was it Oscar Wilde said about the death of Little Nell?
Heart of stone or no, I couldn’t make it through the D.C.
Shakespeare Theatre’s new “adaptation” of
Ibsen’s Ghosts without laughing. My lady friend tried a
few quiet zingers but by the end, she’d gotten all the way to open
mockery.
The husband-and-wife tag team, writer-director Edwin Sherin and
leading lady Jane Alexander, were about as subtle as a pair of
steroid addled pro
wrestlers pummeling a helpless opponent. Anything worthwhile in
the original was squeezed out by the sheer weight of the poor
direction and the annoying rewrite. Set in the 1980s, Helen Alving
is transformed from interesting widow and genuinely strong woman
into a shrill feminist, and that’s just for starters.
In this version, Mrs. Alving’s son Oswald (played by the
talented but horribly miscast Alexander Pascal) is whiny, preachy,
and dying not of syphilis but of AIDS. This might be a novel twist
but it erases the murky origin of the disease which was so crucial
to Ibsen’s story. To wit, Oswald insisted that he did nothing to
bring this on himself, so he was either lying or he got it from his
mother, in which case the tragedy wasn’t likely to end with his
death. The modern Oswald dispels this ambiguity by confessing to
having had sex with anything that moved.
And so it goes. Sherin’s Pastor Manders is a stuffed suit,
arrogant Christer, and hypocritical buffoon. Not once does he
manage to sound like the reasonable or caring human being who
occasionally peaks through in the original. In an innovation that
only a drunken pill-popping mother could love, the set is
surrounded by nude canvasses of some of the poor slum dwellers of
New York, which both Oswald and Helen use to anger and shame the
prudish Manders. Pascal inexplicably spends the last 20 minutes or
so in the buff (though usually covered by blankets).
Afterward, the small group of theatergoers I had joined sat at a
nearby café and tried to figure out what exactly
that was all about. We agreed that it was unbelievably bad
(“If you only see one play this season, don’t see this one,” said
one wag) and on most of the general broad criticisms (e.g., too
preachy, too unbalanced, too gay), but I was frustrated that we
were unable to get at the core of the play’s badness.
Sure, it was a weak production but let’s face it,
Ghosts is a bit heavy-handed to begin with, and it lends
itself to lefty agitprop by virtue of its attempts at social
relevance. When it originally opened in London, the conservative
Telegraph critic called it “an open drain; a loathsome
sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.” The accompanying
booklet says that the modern version was shooting for “the same
disruptive effect” as the original.
Then again, there is something to be said for the purist
argument. That is, they should have staged Ibsen, not Sherin. By
making the characters less grating, the old playwright sucks you in
and makes the moralizing and questioning more palatable. By
grounding it firmly in the idea of original sin, he was able to
call conventions and mores into question far more effectively than
by churning out rants against religion and paeans to sexual
liberation.
But as we hashed it out, these criticisms only carried us so far
in describing why we hated it. Its badness seemed to be finally
irreducible, or it was until my agitated seatmate decided to check
the brochure for the names of the sponsors. In the “$100,000 and
above” category was listed the National Endowment for the Arts and
the National Endowment for the Humanities. “How about that,” she
said. “Your tax dollars at work.”
