Theatre in Review: Scenes from a Marriage (New York Theatre Workshop)

	Caption: Roslyn Ruff, Dallas Roberts. Photo: Jan Versweyveld

The director Ivo van Hove has made a career out of turning classic texts into bizarre exercises in style. I am thinking of his version of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Blanche DuBois was repeatedly tossed into a bathtub, or The Little Foxes, staged like a Fritz Lang horror film, in which the entire cast seemed permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I missed the Hedda Gabler in which Elizabeth Marvel was reportedly doused with V-8 juice, and The Misanthrope, in which, according to one reviewer, Bill Camp covered himself with "chocolate sauce, ketchup and fresh watermelon, among other foodstuff," later rolling around "in a pile of honest-to-goodness garbage." The director's productions are acclaimed in certain quarters, but the ability to appreciate them depends on one's point of view: Are they daring reinterpretations of overfamiliar texts, or wild, self-indulgent carryings-on that have little or nothing to do with the play at hand?

This time out, van Hove has turned his attention to a film--Scenes from a Marriage, Ingmar Bergman's 1973 classic of total conjugal warfare--with results that are alternately gripping and confounding. Adapted from a six-hour television series, Scenes from a Marriage, the film, explored its characters' hearts and minds with clinical honesty, subjecting them to camera close-ups that were the cinematic equivalent of police interrogations. Spurred by emotionally naked performances by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann (Bergman's ex-lover, and the mother of his daughter), Scenes from a Marriage was, even during the heyday of the European directors, a singular case of an artist turning his conflicts and neuroses into searing drama. If you've ever seen it, you haven't forgotten it.

Van Hove's decision to take on one the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century results in a tug of war between auteurs, neither of whom comes out on top. Running three-and-a-half hours and requiring several changes of venue, Scenes from a Marriage, the play, has plenty of striking moments, but is often stuck uncomfortably between Bergman's harrowing, too-close-for-comfort insights, and van Hove's desire to rearrange this often ugly and deeply personal material into new and more abstract patterns.

On arrival at New York Theatre Workshop, one is given a colored wristband that determines your experience of the first act. The theatre's interior has been divided into three mini-stages, arranged in a circle around a central area that is visible through the window in the upstage wall of each set. One sees a 30-minute scene, then moves to the next space, and a half-hour later, moves again. In each venue, a different pair of actors takes on the roles of Johan and Marianne, whose seemingly perfect marriage falls apart in spectacular fashion.

Despite this overelaborate setup-it's like going to a fun house where nobody has any fun-the use of these miniature spaces forces us into a closeness with the actors, creating a theatrical analogue for Bergman's pitilessly probing camera. At times, we can hear bits and pieces of the other scenes, particularly when voices are raised in ire; we also can see actors as they exit, in character, into the central arena. Surprisingly, all of this enriches the experience, adding to the growing atmosphere of depression and anxiety. The production designer, Jan Versweyveld, has shown real imagination and daring in reworking the theatre to his own purposes.

It's also fascinating to see three pairs of gifted actors apply their individual styles to the script, rendered in an eminently speakable translation by Emily Mann. Even if none of them achieve the heights of their cinematic predecessors, they do approach the script in fresh and interesting ways. Thus Alex Hurt and Susannah Flood deftly capture the passive-aggression that dominates Johan and Marianne's relationship-first as a small dinner party implodes, thanks to the vicious feuding of their guests, and, later, as they edgily debate whether to keep the baby Marianne is carrying. She has rather conveniently forgotten to use birth control and waited until the third month to inform Johan, who is as upset by her deception as the prospect of another child. Their discussion of this is a kind of high-stakes psychological poker game, played by a pair of cagey professionals. Erin Gann and Carmen Zilles are highly effective as the dinner guests who can't stop themselves from oversharing to horrible effect.

Dallas Roberts and Roslyn Ruff take over in the second sequence, as the slightly older Johan and Marianne confront their cooled passion for each other. This sequence is noticeably weaker; the dialogue turns a tad banal and the characters whine too much, although Ruff does work up a fine fury from time to time. The best moments feature Johan, an academic, enduring the scalding opinions of a colleague (Emma Ramos) regarding some poems he has written ("We all used to think you were going to be a star someday," she says, putting in the knife ever so casually), and Marianne, who is a lawyer, interviewing a middle-aged client (a riveting Mia Katigbak) who, thanks to her stifling marriage, is losing access to physical sensations. ("I think I'm capable of love, but it's all sealed off from me, like it's in a locked room.")

The most slam-bang sequence features the now middle-aged Johan cruelly informing Marianne that he is leaving for Paris the next morning with his much-younger lover. Arliss Howard's Johan is equal parts self-hatred and self-absorption. ("How do I tell you that making love to you is deadly dull even though it's technically perfect? How can I say that I'd like to smack you during breakfast when you sit there tidily peeling your egg?") Tina Benko, one of the wittiest and most accomplished actresses around, nails Marianne's confusion and rage-one minute she is vilifying Johan, the next minute she is helping him pack. The scene ends with a devastating monologue in which Marianne, on the phone with a friend, discovers that she was last in their circle to discover Johan's infidelity.

After intermission, which lasts 30 minutes, the theatre's interior is radically reconfigured. The audience surrounds a single circular playing area in which all three couples enact, as a group, the scene in which Johan and Marianne meet up some time later, and he announces he is leaving for Australia without his young lover. It's a game of tag-team Bergman: Flood says something to Roberts, who replies to Benko, who makes a comment to Hurt. The intricate staging is equally impressive and dismaying; with one sweeping stroke, van Hove destroys the intimacy so carefully built up in the play's first half, asking us to instead admire the traffic patterns he creates while moving the actors around the stage. Even more startlingly, the director stages the most crucial scene-in which a meeting to sign divorce papers is interrupted by an impromptu sexual encounter followed by a savage, no-holds-barred confrontation--with all three couples playing the scene at once. The effect is polyphonic, but not especially engaging; as the screaming mounts, it threatens to descend into total incoherence.

Things pick up after that, with a rueful discussion of marriage between Benko's Marianne and her mother (Katigbak again), and a final encounter, featuring Benko and Howard, showing Johan and Marianne, now married to others and getting together for extramarital trysts. As Johan wryly notes, now that he is divorced from Marianne, she is the only woman with whom he can truly be honest. It's a fine ironic conclusion, but the production never really recovers from all the staging tricks of the second half. About 30 minutes before the end, Scenes from a Marriage starts to suffer from a serious deficit of energy and invention. This is demonstrated all too clearly by the eleventh-hour sequence in which Howard performs an interpretive dance to a recording of "The Windmills of Your Mind."

Oddly, the action seems to take place in some kind of temporal and geographic void. Vinyl records are played in each scene, with Simon and Garfunkel and Michel Legrand among the preferred artists. Yet Versweyveld has dressed everyone in contemporary casual wear, and at one point we see Roberts in bed, reading a book on his smart phone. At the same time, an aura of Sweden in the 1970s prevails: Johan and Marianne are trapped in conventional lives that include visiting their parents for dinner every Sunday. Marianne frets about telling her parents about the divorce. And Marianne's gradual discovery that she needs an identity apart from her husband seems like Feminism 101. On screen, Scenes from a Marriage drew its power from the specifics of the characters' lives; on stage, it seems to exist in a blur that, oddly, makes it feel less powerful than its source material.

Still, if we're going to have Bergman adapted to the stage, Scenes from a Marriage is vastly superior to the appalling, lifeless Through a Glass Darkly, staged by Atlantic Theater at New York Theatre Workshop a few years ago. (We will save discussion of A Little Night Music, the superb musical based on Smiles of a Summer Night, for another day.) But, to my mind, theatre is never really enjoyable when one isn't allowed to forget the director's presence; this is Ivo van Hove's Scenes from a Marriage, and it doesn't do justice to its origins.--David Barbour