Strindberg's Wives

The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg had a complicated relationship with women. That comes across in the new adaptation of his play Creditors by Jen Silverman.

As I just saw Creditors this afternoon, now is a good time to go over Strindberg's rather tumultuous marital history and how it impacted his plays. It was in 1875 that he first met Siri von Essen, a married baroness who likely provided the model for Tekla in Creditors.

Von Essen had always wanted to be an actor, and in 1877 she began performing at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. That same year, she married Strindberg, having secured a divorce from her first husband only the year prior. She appeared in Strindberg's historical drama The Secret of the Guild, and after his turn toward Naturalism she originated the title role in Miss Julie.

Together, Strindberg and von Essen founded the Scandinavian Experimental Theatre which premiered his play The Stronger with her as Madame X. That play premiered together with Creditors and a third Strindberg one-act play, Pariah. Unfortunately, the theatre failed, as did their marriage. The author was plunged into a depression he later referred to as his Inferno Crisis. Strindberg ultimately abandoned both his atheism and his embrace of Naturalism.

Emerging from his Inferno Crisis, Strindberg met the 20-year-old Frida Uhl, whom he married the same year he wrote his comedy Playing with Fire. Uhl had lots of ideas about how to market his plays internationally, but Strindberg wasn't big on women having ideas of their own. To absolutely no one's surprise, the couple ended up divorcing. Uhl went on to become the lover of another playwright, Frank Wedekind, and a pioneer in cabaret performance.

After the hurricane of his relationship with Uhl, Strindberg turned back toward religion. This was reflected in his three-part play To Damascus, as well as the history plays he returned to writing with the Vasa trilogy: The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa, and Erik XIV. As he returned to productivity as a playwright, he also met a young actress, Harriet Bosse. He chose her to play the role of "The Lady" in To Damascus as well as Eleonora in Easter.

The two were married in 1901, and the following year, Bosse appeared as the Daughter of Indra in Strindberg's A Dream Play. His jealousy, which seems to have crossed over into insanity at times, doomed this marriage as well. They separated, and then divorced. Strindberg began writing a grand cycle of history plays based on world-changing figures like Socrates and Jesus, but he had greater artistic success with smaller works.

In 1907, Strindberg co-founded a new theatre in Stockholm to perform chamber plays, including The Ghost Sonata. Like pieces of chamber music, these dramas were smaller in scale but still ambitious artistically. The works were meant to be performed without intermissions and to an audience of no more than 160.

Even in the late chamber plays, you can still see the influence of the powerful women in Strindberg's life. It clearly wasn't easy being married to Strindberg, and the theatre owes a debt to the women who inspired him.

Conference Closed

Well, the International Conference on Romanticism is officially closed now, my paper on Lord Byron's play Manfred is done with, and tomorrow I'll be heading back to London to spend time with my sister.

I've been attending two conferences back to back, having just finished the Romantic Facts and Fantasies conference in Nottingham, sponsored by the British Association for Romantic Studies. I've been enjoying Manchester, though, and some of the excellent papers here.

Wednesday night, Marlene Daut gave a keynote address on "The Age of Haitian Romanticism, which introduced me to a number of Haitian playwrights, including Juste Chanlatte and Henri Chauvet. She also discussed how the French writer Alphonse de Lamartine wrote a play about the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture and was both influenced by Haitian writers and praised by them.

Thursday morning there was a great session on Romantic music and its composers. Though it is quite late to be considered Romanticism proper, Amanda Hsieh gave an interesting talk on Franz Schreker's opera Die Gezeichneten, which is based on a play by Frank Wedekind. Next, Amy Garnai delivered a fascinating paper on the friendship between dramatist Thomas Holcroft and composer Joseph Haydn, who spent time in England. The final paper in the session, which was by Barry Cooper, looked at aspects of Romanticism in the life and music of Beethoven. He naturally talked about Fidelio, but also discussed Beethoven's oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one, but now I want to hear it!

Today I took part in an article writing workshop, which was helpful. Though the conference officially closed today, there was supposed to be an outing tomorrow to the Peak District National Park for some hiking. Unfortunately, the heavy rains recently have led to concerns about a dam in the area bursting, and rail service has been disrupted. The conference planners had to cancel the trip, so I'll probably spend some time at a museum tomorrow before returning to London.

Once back in the U.S., I'll be quickly off again, to see my play The Love Songs of Brooklynites at the Theatre of Western Springs outside of Chicago. It's been a busy summer, but in a good way!

Spring Awakening

Last night, I saw Deaf West's wonderful production of Spring Awakening. While I was excited to see this revival, the original musical opened on Broadway less than a decade ago. This begged the question: Why is Deaf West doing this play now?

I found my question answered as soon as I opened the Playbill and found this director's note:

In 1891, Frank Wedekind's highly controversial and socially indicting play, Fruhlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), was published in Germany and subsequently banned. Eleven years prior, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf (known as the Milan Conference) passed a resolution banning sign language in schools across Europe and the United States, declaring Oralism (lip reading, speech and mimicking mouth shapes) superior. The term given to Deaf students unable to succeed with the abusive oral method was "Failure," the same word that sends young Moritz Stiefel down his destructive path. 

Deaf West's production makes Spring Awakening not just about the educational system of a hundred years ago or so, but specifically about the educational system for the Deaf at that time. Moritz, generally considered the most sympathetic character in the play, is played by a Deaf actor (Daniel N. Durant) and voiced by a hearing actor (Alex Boniello) who also plays guitar. This pairing of two different performers is used for a number of parts, though other roles, such as the central figure of Melchior (Austin P. McKenzie), are played by actors who both speak and sign.

While I was prepared for that, I was not prepared for the brilliant use of supertitles in the production. We first get a taste of the supertitles during a scene where the male students are getting a Latin lesson. At first, Latin appears on a blackboard, with hearing students dutifully reciting it and Deaf students trying to spell it out. Quickly, however, we get the supertitles used in even more creative ways. Best of all, they are used for the benefit of both Deaf and hearing audiences. Sometimes, an actor might speak without signing, but the words will appear in a projection. Other times, an actor will sign without a spoken voice, but with supertitles for those who don't know ASL.

As a hearing member of the audience, I greatly appreciated the moments when the Deaf actors were allowed to perform without being voiced (and the voice actors had some pretty incredible pipes, so that's saying something). In the first act, Moritz has a scene with his father (Russell Harvard) that is performed nearly entirely in silence. The contrast with the very loud rock score creates an added intensity that is perfect for the moment. Even more powerful is the moment in Act II when Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank), who is normally voiced by musician Katie Boeck, vocalizes for herself as she confronts her mother.

The musical version of Spring Awakening takes liberties with Wedekind's original text, including changing the ending, but while this is a very different show from the play, it succeeds on its own merits. The songs by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater (with frequently indecent lyrics) hit just the right tone for certain moments.

This revival also features some incredibly gifted performers, including Marlee Matlin, Camryn Manheim, and Patrick Page (who was brilliant in this summer's production of Cymbeline), as well as some younger performers to watch for in the future, including Krysta Rodriguez and Ali Stroker.

If you want to see the show, hurry, since it's a limited run ending January 24. You can get more information here:

Spring Awakening

Thoughts on Wedekind

In my last post, I mentioned that Carl Sternheim married Frank Wedekind's daughter Pamela. Literally, he was the older playwright's son-in-law. Spiritually, Sternheim also saw himself as the artistic son of Wedekind.

Well, Frank Wedekind, it so happens, ran off with August Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl. Literally, he slept with Strindberg's wife. By extension, we might say that Wedekind took Strindberg's artistic legacy, grabbed it, ran off with it to the nearest hotel room, and....

Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor, but Strindberg's ideas do seem to come back in the plays of Wedekind in a new and rougher form. Strindberg's frank discussion of sexuality, his problematic view of male-female relations, his testing of the limits of patriarchal authority, all these return in Spring Awakening, Earth Spirit, and Pandora's Box. With Wedekind, however, caution is thrown to the wind, and the drama is more raw, exciting, and for many people (perhaps even most), downright offensive. (Or does the average theatre-goer think it's perfectly acceptable to portray a circle-jerk onstage?)

After deciding to drop out of law school, Wedekind had an argument with his father in which he physically struck the old man, an act of rebellion against the older generation that the playwright never quite left. Still, when Spring Awakening premiered in Berlin in 1906, Wedekind literally put himself onstage as a representative of the older generation, playing the Masked Man.

Who was that Masked Man? Well, when Melchior, the protagonist in Spring Awakening, asks that very question, the man responds, "That will become clear." He makes it clear he is not Melchior's father, but that he wants the boy to get out of the graveyard, escaping a potential death. If Melchior is a semi-autobiographical character, the Masked Man, played by the author himself, might be seen as an adult version of Melchior, warning his younger self away from a possible suicide.

The stranger's warning, that suicide will seem ridiculous to Melchior once he has a warm dinner under his belt, is the advice of an adult. It is an instruction given by someone no longer subject to the vast and violent emotions of adolescence. It works, however, and it works perhaps because it does not come from the father. Like Christian in Sternheim's The Snob, Melchior can become a truly self-made man. His salvation comes not from his society, but from the moral courage he finds within himself.

Thoughts on Sternheim

This summer, I had the pleasure of seeing two Sternheim plays in one with David Mouchtar-Samorai's mash-up of Die Hose and Burger Schippel at the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen. Both plays satirize the pretensions of the would-be bourgeois, so they very much fit together.

Carl Sternheim had a habit of recycling his characters. In fact, Die Hose began a cycle of plays by Sternheim on what he called "The Heroic Life of the Bourgeois." He followed up Die Hose with his 1914 play Der Snob. This play continues the story of Theobald and Louise Maske, as well as letting the audience in on the life of their son, whose birth is alluded to in the previous play.

The first act of Der Snob opens with the ironically named son, Christian Snob, breaking off a relationship with Sybil, a lover who helped him rise in society but whom he has now outgrown. He offers Sybil cash to pay for her services, with interest, so he can be completely independent and owe nothing to anything. Next, he tries to make the same arrangement with his parents, paying them for everything they spent raising him. It's as if he wants to be a truly self-made man.

Christian aims to marry Marianne, the daughter of a count. In the second act, he makes progress toward this goal and becomes engaged to Marianne, in spite of the count's reservations. The presence of his father, however, becomes a source of continual worry. Christian seems to vacillate between being embarrassed by his father and wanting to use Theobald to rub the count's nose in the fact that his daughter is marrying such an upstart.

In the third act, the story of Louise's courters in Die Hose comes back, and Christian begins to wonder whether or not he might be the bastard son of a Viscount. This becomes a source of both shame and titillation. In the final scene, Marianne discovers the secret on her wedding night. She enthusiastically greets a portrait of Louise as "sweet mother adultress" and Christian as her "dear husband and lord."

With such complicated psychosexual messes in his plays, it's as if Sternheim is the spiritual son of Frank Wedekind. In fact, Sternheim married Pamela Wedekind in 1930, becoming the great playwright's son-in-law. Wedekind was dead by that time, but still, you can't make this stuff up!

Read my next post for my thoughts of Wedekind.