Black comedy comes in all forms, and sometimes provides its own punchlines. I’ll never forget the time a theatre director called me up to report, with some surprise, that public response to his unique theatrical series was unexpectedly tepid. His event? A Strindberg Festival. At Christmas time.
The Swedish playwright is a household name in bleak visions of life. And his obsessions with human corruption and guilt, and the illusion of earthly appearances, fuel his increasingly strange late-period forays into mysticism and non-realism. Strindberg is a handful, to be sure — and a gilt-edged invitation to the inventive director. Strindberg’s fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, for example, directed no fewer than four different productions.
The production of Strindberg’s mysterious 1907 chamber piece The Ghost Sonata that opens the Studio Theatre season is a tangible demonstration of what can go wrong when an artlessly artsy, self-conscious jumble of visual and aural images gets thrown onto the stage, in hopes either that some of them will stick or, alternately, that being bizarre and whimsical is enough.
The chamber adaptation, directed by the enterprising MFA candidate Jessica Carmichael, presents like the first draft of something. For one thing, it leaves a cast of fine veteran actors (Melissa Thingelstad, Ian Leung and Marie Nychka among them) and promising newcomers (Richard Lam, Sereana Malani) stranded onstage posturing and “doing” kooky instead of delivering performances. For another, it mashes the three-movement musical structure of the piece into an 82-minute quickie that, without a replacement structure, seems even in its brevity like an overlong Strindberg parody.
It is, of course, a famously elusive play. But, as the title suggests, The Ghost Sonata does have a shape of sorts — witness the fact that it’s often stepped outside its own resonant symbolism and invited promenade-style productions, in which the audience enters the house of ghostly secrets to which The Student is irresistibly drawn. Here, after a whispery voice-over intro, which leaves phrases like “brooding on the vast abyss” wafting through the darkness, we see The Old Man (Leung) swimming on the ground toward his wheelchair like a merman, and The Milkmaid (Mari Chartier) approaching and retreating, grimacing and acting spooky.
And so it goes. There are vivid images to be sure. LLARS Design, also responsible for the striking lighting, provides a grand staircase down which the magnificently costumed Dark Lady (Thingelstad) arrives onstage, like Dolly Levi at the Harmonia Gardens. The actor has an arresting voice and great stage presence. But after her entrance, what then? The Dark Lady drifts through the play, looking impressively scowly, wielding a big sword. Later she will appear as a monstrous cook, but it’s evidently just for the fleeting fun of an image, with none of the play’s sense that she’s draining the household of its vital juices.
It is never less than a pleasure to see Leung onstage; he gives edge (not to mention a crisp bite on consonants) to The Old Man, a magus with secrets of his own, though they only figure in the production when he lets slip, verbally, what they are. The Student (the always engaging Lam), co-opted by The Old Man to enter the house of ghosts and effect an atonement for his past crimes, disappears for lengthy periods. Has he left to do his homework? Three “Dream Figures” swan around in dance mode reminding us that this is a ghost story. In a curious choice, the Colonel is played by a mechanized dressmaker’s dummy.
In the end we’re watching a directorial concept that the play is “weird,” decorated by random quotations from the text. Somehow it just doesn’t seem enough.