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IN THIS ISSUE:A NOTE FROM ARTISTIC DIRECTOR BRIAN KULICK

IBSEN AND THE GENESIS OF PEER GYNT

AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JOHN DOYLE

THE NEWSLETTER OF CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY • VOLUME 19, NUMBER 4 • SPRING 2016

YESTERDAY, I was giving my sixteen-year-old son some money so he could buy lunch for himself when I had one of those moments of what I call temporal vertigo; that strange sensation where time seems to collapse and suddenly, in this case, it was me who was sixteen getting lunch money from my father. The thirty-eight years between these incidents having contracted into a circuit of several seconds of consciousness. A similar dizzying sensation confronts me now as I write this last program note for the CLASSIC newsletter as CSC's Artistic Director, it seems like just yesterday that I sat down to introduce myself to the Classic Stage audience. Can it actually be thirteen years that have elapsed before this keyboard? That would mean, some forty or so "Notes From the Artistic Director"?! Who knew I had so much to say? When I look back on that very first "Note" I can't help but blush at my youthful audacity. In it I evoke the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and dedicate the theater to what he calls Proklyantya Voprosy. This Russian phrase roughly translates as "The Accursed Questions." There are, according to Berlin, three fundamental questions that dogged the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists: "Why are we here?" "How should we live?" And perhaps, most importantly, "What must we do." Those were the questions I wanted to ask with the programming of CSC. I suppose, if I were brought before an aesthetic court of law and asked to defend myself and my choice of programming, I would still evoke those three questions as the driving force behind this thirteen-year conversation I have had the great opportunity to undertake with the audience. I have tried to keep these questions alive by presenting Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, and many other great writers of our past and present. What unites these writers is a desire to pose these questions and, provocatively, leave the answers up to us.

When I am asked about my favorite moments as Artistic Director, they always revolve around being part of the audience experiencing one of these "questions." I have two such moments, which I hope you will indulge me in sharing with you. The first, I have mentioned before in these notes. It came at the end of the first act of David Ives' New Jerusalem, a play about the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam. The play takes place in a synagogue where Spinoza is defending himself before a rabbinical tribunal, things are not looking so good for poor Baruch and then, out of the blue, he blurts out, "But I can prove the existence of G-d." The tribunal agrees to hear Spinoza's claim, adjourning for a brief break that coincides with our intermission. This was one of the rare times where CSC lost not a single audience member during the break. Everyone returned: believers, atheists, and agnostics alike, all eager to hear this Jewish “kid" prove the existence of G-d. It was one of the most wonderful hours I've ever spent in the theater because of the quality of silence. This silence had the weight and density of a collective kind of listening, which comes on those rare occasions when a group confronts an unresolved core issue. And in so doing, we are reminded of the fundamental plurality of our existence. We are dislodged from our alienated "I" and momentarily returned to our social selves. We are not alone. Our concerns for existence rhyme with others and in that rhyming a community can be rediscovered. This "community of concern" that can be found in the theater is different from those moments of other social gathering, say at a political rally or at a service in a house of worship; perhaps because when theater really works (which is very rare) it allows us to collectively experience a question just before its answer is articulated by the slightly restrictive vantage points of politics or religion. When theater is at its best, we find ourselves, for two or so hours, living within the tension of an unresolved question and discovering our commonality during

that very suspension of knowingness. Afterwards, we return to the world where our over-eager institutions step in to try to explain everything for us. In their endeavor to do so, they can, inadvertently, end up dividing us with their well-intentioned, but often reductive, answers. I say reductive only because reality will always exceed our comprehension and any explanation is bound to fall short of the confounding complexity of being-in-the-world; but a shared experience (like that of theater), free of the need of explanation, can bring us all together before the immense density of certain fundamental problems; returning us to our basic commonality of simply not knowing. Another electric moment for me happened during the fourth and final act of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Here again the CSC audience seemed to hold its breath as these characters were making their last life-altering decisions. In these final moments of the play, the audience seemed to be converted into a convocation of recording angels whose job was to bear witness to these poor souls who were incapable of escaping their quotidian purgatory. Experiencing this reminded me of that quote from La Fontaine, "To cry for oneself is human; to cry for another, divine." At the end of Three Sisters, Chekhov confers upon us, the audience, a kind of secular divinity, where we see these characters and do not judge them, but rather, simply, understand them. For a moment, two hundred or so disparate audience members feel as one for the destiny of another. We have been released from the relativistic mode of empathy (a nineteenth-century word invented to explain our individual and private relationship to an expressionist painting) and brought back to a much older and all-embracing word known as sympathy. A word whose etymological origins capture the experience of "feeling with." That tiny, little word "with" enfolds myself, a fictive other, and an entire audience, all joined by a common concern. That is the power of theater and its gum-stuck machinery comes to life around those

burning questions of existence, uniting us in the process as we confront the mysteries that life presents. It is especially meaningful for me to see John Doyle, our Associate Director and soon-to-be Artistic Director, take on the same sort of accursed questions with his mounting of PEER GYNT, a play which explores these problems from a Nordic, rather than Slavic, vantage point. I look forward to returning as an audience member, and experiencing the plays and questions John puts forward during his tenure at the helm of CSC. I know 13th Street is in store for a fresh and bracing chapter in its ongoing history.

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to once again thank you, the devoted audience of CSC, for your support over these years. My mentor, Gordon Davidson, used to say, "In order to have great theater, you have to have great audiences." And I experienced this year after year with all of you, the greatest audience in the whole of New York City. Thank you for making CSC such a vital and necessary space for the continued exploration of the human condition.

- Brian KulickArtistic Director

FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

THOSE ACCURSED QUESTIONS: A FINAL NOTE

Ibsen and the Genesis of PEER GYNTBefore there was the Ibsen of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, there was the Ibsen of Brand and PEER GYNT. It is his late realist cycle of plays, beginning with A Doll's House and ending with When We Dead Awaken, that nowadays eclipses this early and often theatrically bolder work. It is easy to forget how truly rich and varied this extraordinary Norwegian dramatist's canon actually is, a theatrical universe that includes comedies, verse tragedies, Roman Emperors, trolls, and even a smattering of ancient Vikings.

Ibsen's formative years (1850-1864) were spent first at the Det Norse Theater (Bergen) and later at the Christiania Theater where he became its Creative Director. During this intense period he was involved in the mounting of hundreds of plays. This work was primarily as a director and producer, but interspersed between the standards of the nineteenth-century repertory, Ibsen tried his own hand at playwriting. The fruits of these early efforts were met with little interest from the viewing public and Ibsen ultimately found himself disenchanted with Norway and its theater scene. In 1864, he took his wife and newborn child to Italy where he would spend the next twenty-seven years in a self-imposed exile.

It is in exile that Ibsen would pen his greatest works, beginning with two epic verse plays: Brand (1865) and PEER GYNT (1867). Brand was Ibsen's first great critical and financial success. This five-act verse tragedy focuses on a maverick preacher, aptly named Brand (Norwegian for "Fire"). He is disgusted with the compromised manner in which modern Christians live their lives. His is an "all or nothing" philosophy that can be found in the Old Testament and which demands an unbending life in service to God's edicts rather than the more comfortable compromises of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society. This ultimately leads Brand and his followers to leave the church they have built and head deep into the mountains to create a "Church without limits." But the rigors of such a life are too hard on Brand's followers and he is ultimately left alone to grapple with his failure to change the world. "Does not salvation consider the will of man?" become Brand's dying words and they resonated deeply with critics and audiences alike. Brand became, in a way, the last gasp of the Romantic/Idealist movement and suddenly Ibsen's name was

being bandied about in the company of such great thinkers and artists who were engaged in a love/hate relationship with Romanticism, a select group which included the likes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and that young Russian upstart named Dostoevsky.

Two years later, on the heels of the success of Brand came PEER GYNT, another five-act verse drama about yet another Nordic iconoclast. It is difficult to talk about PEER without a nod toward Brand since PEER seems to continue Ibsen's ongoing dialogue with the roots of Romanticism and the problems of the individual versus society. In fact, PEER seems to parody the Romantic, individualistic iconoclast that Brand became for critics and audiences alike. Ibsen's intentions remain somewhat coy in his correspondence in regards to PEER.

In January 1867, Ibsen wrote to his publisher that he had just concluded penning, "A long dramatic poem, having as its principal a part-legendary, part-fictional character from Norwegian folklore during recent times. It will bear no resemblance to Brand, and will contact no direct polemics." Perhaps we should take Ibsen here at his word. Why shouldn't he, after the relentless high-mindedness of Brand, have something of a lark with PEER? Isn't every author entitled to a little bit of fun after the rigors of an intellectual tragedy? And yet, one can't help but feel that somewhere in Ibsen's unconscious, PEER is a kind of theatrical objective correlative to the "Brand-ism" that so captivated his newfound audience; hidden within the joyride of PEER, between his tall tales and escapades with trolls, there lies the feeling of a continued critique; Brand's grandstanding gives way to Peer's antics, sending up the Brands of the world and calling the import of "the Self", that great invention of the nineteenth century, into question.

Regardless, something about PEER's irrepressible spirit continues to captivate contemporary audiences. The play has become a mainstay of our dramatic repertory whereas its counterpart, Brand, is left to brood about the fate of mankind on the shelves of countless libraries rather than the stages of our modern theater. No doubt much of Peer's success has to do with his own protean invention and reinvention of himself and his

surroundings. In this sense, Peer is something of a perennial author and the hero of his stories is always, resolutely and unapologetically himself. Fiction is Peer's constant companion and perfect foil to the prosaic nature of truth, which can be, let's face it, often lacking in color and variety. Ibsen's Peer is known to "indulge" the truth and embroider the otherwise-quotidian world with a tall tale, the taller the better. Why not make an otherwise humdrum Monday morning sound all the more exciting by adding a made up struggle with a troll or two? Peer's impatient relationship with the quotidian is like that of the author Philip K. Dick, who once wrote, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” Peer seems forever allergic to the humdrum of the next morning, and it is this predisposition that sends him around the world in search for adventure. It is this hunger for the "more-ness" of life has placed him in a select pantheon of literary figures that includes, Dante's Ulysses, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Goethe's Faust.

The equally irrepressible critic Harold Bloom writes that Peer, "Far more than Goethe’s Faust, is the one nineteenth-century literary character who has the largeness of the grandest characters of Renaissance imaginings. Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hugo, even Balzac have no single figure quite so exuberant, outrageous, vitalistic as Peer Gynt. He merely seems initially to be an unlikely candidate for such eminence: what is he, we say, except a kind of Norwegian roaring boy, marvelously attractive to women (in his youth), a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolater, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver? But this is paltry moralizing, all too much like the scholarly chorus that rants against Falstaff. True, Peer, unlike Falstaff, is not a great wit (though Peer can be very funny). But in the Yahwistic Biblical sense, Peer the scamp bears the Blessing: more life.”

And perhaps it is this insatiability that is at the root of Peer's theatrical

longevity. It sends him around the world but also returns him home. There he must confront his past, his lost love, and a mysterious button molder who informs Peer that his soul must be melted down with other faulty goods unless he can explain when and where he was ever truly "himself." And it is here that Peer finds that he is in the same situation as Brand. Both Peer and Brand are held to a final existential accounting, both iconoclasts are asked to justify themselves and, in the end, find justification lacking. Not even the comic register of the play can help Peer escape such an accounting. And so, there they stand, the proverbial rogue and holy man, polar opposites, faced with the same dilemma, the dilemma of their time, our time, all time: justify yourself. This is Ibsen's great question and he continues it, from these epic verse plays that take place on the tops of mountains and in the sands of Egypt, all the way to the well-appointed living rooms of the nineteenth-century bourgeois, rooms that still find their way onto our twenty-first century stages, and questions that still demand answers.

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INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JOHN DOYLE Q: What do you think accounts for PEER GYNT’s continued relevance and why is it a play that attracts master directors such as yourself?

JD: I think there are elements of the play that I feel are almost impossible, so it provides you with so many challenges. How do you stage it? How do you stage a man talking to an onion? How do you do some of the tasks that Ibsen gives you to do? So that’s probably why it attracts people like myself who like to problem solve in the theater. To me, the piece is about our mortality and how we live our lives and the crossroads that we come to in our lives. In the case of Peer Gynt, I suppose originally Ibsen imagined an older man. It’s like a Seven Ages of Man story where you are watching somebody enact their life, the mistakes they made and how they run

away from those mistakes, and they run away to bigger mistakes and, in doing so, they realize the place to face your mistakes, where peace may lie, is at home, is home. How do we face the errors of our lives? Face the power of the imagination, which is what Peer has? He has a vivid imagination, given to him by his mother in storytelling and that goes wrong and topples him. At what point does the imagination become the lie? The play explores that and that’s fascinating. So I think of those issues of when we reach the crossroads in our lives: what do we do? Which way do we go? They’ll always have a tremendously deep relevance because we all have those crossroads in our lives and we all know what they are.

Q: The size and the scope of the play—it can easily become a six-hour affair and you’re cutting the play considerably. I was wondering, how do you go about such a vetting and how do you decide what stays and what goes?

JD: I’m adapting and directing it, but I see those two jobs almost being one really. You have to decide, “What I am trying to say with the play? What are the aspects of the play that I find most fascinating?” I find the fifth act the most interesting. It’s the area that I’ve cut least, so how do I plateau the play? How do I get the play to the point of telling the depth of that act? And that determines then what stays or doesn’t. You still have to keep the story clear. I always knew that I wanted to do it in an intimate way, in the round, with a small company. I felt that would stop it being like a Grimm fairy tale, or like a pageant, and more about what we remember in our lives. Quite a lot of what I’ve taken out is traditionally taken out, or there are many precedents for many of the cuts. Ibsen never really intended it to be staged initially. It was a poem as far as he was concerned, a sort of a treatise on man’s life. I definitely want this production to be done straight through, because I feel, that way, you get the purgatory that can lie inside of the play. I mean that in the best possible way, because a lot of it is very funny. The ritual of telling man’s life is easier without the intermission.

Q: Does it give you pause that you are following in the directorial footsteps of Ingmar Bergman, Peter Stein, and other great directors who have tackled this play. How do you approach such a vaunted work and keep a clear head?

JD: You know, you don’t think about it. You’d never get up in the morning. You just have to think, “What can I do? What can I bring to this?” When you’re doing a play like PEER GYNT you have a great sense of responsibility because it’s not done very often, people don’t get to see it much, so it’s a special occasion. It is a privilege to do the play and that I feel very conscious of. I think, “who have I got in the room with me? What can I bring out that will hopefully

make it clear but, at the same time, illuminate it in some way? What theatrical techniques am I interested in exploring while doing that?” I also teach at Princeton, so I’m aware of the academic viewpoints, but as a director, it’s about not overthinking it.

Q: You’re very well known for a minimalist approach to making plays. What draws you to such an approach and how do you think it works with such a maximalist text like PEER GYNT?

JD: People say I’m a minimalist. I quite like that notion, but it’s not something I’ve ever called myself. I have an interest in how you get to the essence. Because my job is to do everything I can to clarify the story, but not get in its way and let it breathe. So my own way of doing that is to clear away. I have a production of The Color Purple running on Broadway at the moment that’s only done by actors with fifteen chairs. Really nothing other than that, a few small props and that’s it. That’s something that, to my mind, you can only do in the theater. So how do I take a play like PEER GYNT, which is so big, and strip it away? My invaluable tool in all of that, whether it’s PEER, or The Color Purple, or Sweeney Todd or whatever it is, is the audience’s imagination. If I put too much structure, stuff, fact, in front of the audience, it will cease to use its imagination, because all of the imagining is done for them.

Q: This is your first non-musical work for CSC. Does moving from musicals to plays change your process at all?

JD: No, my process is based on everybody being in the room all the time; the actor is usually audience to the work so nobody leaves the space. They are all there for the story, all the time. The way of working is exploratory. I explore ideas in scenes. I don’t do any table work. I don’t expect anybody to do any research. I always use the text only. The play gives you the form if you listen. If you can hold on as a director through the whole rehearsal process with the exploration of what you’re trying to say and have some view, however simple, about what you’re trying to say, then you

don’t even have to be able to articulate that, it’s just a feeling and it grows, it bakes by itself as long as you are asking the right questions. I think my job, to the actor particularly, is to ask questions, and they should be questions to which I don’t know the answer.

Q: Next year will be your first season as Artistic Director at CSC. What kind of programming can people expect in the coming years?

JD: I’m interested in what the word “classical” means to people. I’m interested in what the classic story is. I’m interested in taking classic plays, or great stories, from all sorts of cultures, and that can mean some of the repertoire that’s already been done. Of course, why wouldn’t I want to do some Shakespeare? Of course, I’m interested in European writers, but I’m also interested in where the American classics fit into that. And it could well mean that a classic play could be a new play, dealing with a particular time or a classic idea. I am really interested in developing some kind of house style where the audience recognizes that if they come to a CSC production, they’re going to have to do some work. They’re going to have to activate their imaginations when they come into the space. There will never be enough weeks in the year for my taste. I never have any shortage of plays that I think would be interesting to do.

From Allegro Photo by: Matthew Murphy

From Passion Photo by: Joan Marcus

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