A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR QUESTIONING IBSEN HENRIK IBSEN A PERFORMANCE HISTORY A CHRONOLOGY OF IBSEN PLAYS A SOCIAL DISEASE FROM THE DIARY OF THE DIRECTOR THE ART BEHIND THE ACTORS: HOW A VIBRANT PAINTING COMES ALIVE A LETTER FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Secrets. The very word connotes something sinister, something repressed, some fact, fear or desire that cannot bear to be revealed, some story that cannot bear telling. We all have secrets, of course. We’d like to think that we don’t perhaps, but we do. However small or inconsequential, however innocent or dark, they weave through the fabric of our lives waiting for our decision to reveal them or to keep them “safe” within the unseen folds of our consciousness. Ironically, it is one of the most shared aspects of our experience, this desire not to tell. Such desires can form a pattern, the overall arc of which becomes a key component of our character. Henrik Ibsen understood the power of such patterns and the dramatic affect they can have on our lives. He was far ahead of his time in that regard. Before Freud began publishing his psychological case studies, Ibsen was creating portraits of people whose behavior was directly connected to the stories they withheld; the revelation of which was so powerful that they threatened to not only undo individual lives but the entire social structure of society. There were legendary riots after the performance of Ibsen’s plays, so great was his talent for creating recognizable people and unleashing secrets that were collectively held by the audience. To bring this enigmatic play to life we have called on our colleague and friend, Jonathan Moscone, artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theater. Artistic directors are always talking about working for each other, but it rarely happens. There are many obstacles to such a seemingly benign event: conflicting schedules, play selection, differing aesthetic sensibilities, etc… But there is an additional secret at play: organizations are afraid of losing their artistic identity. There is a strong feeling among many theatre professionals that the vision of an artistic director is in some way owned by the institution and that to produce the work of another artistic director, especially one residing in the same geographical area, is to diminish one’s corporate identity. It’s time to renounce this mythology. I have known Jonathan for over twenty years. He was an intern at Berkeley Rep when he was barely more than a teenager, before heading off to Yale and to a career in the theatre that has fortunately brought him back to the Bay Area. We welcome him and his entire cast, which features Bay Area stalwarts Emily Ackerman and Brian Keith Russell, third year A.C.T. M.F.A. student Davis Duffield (appearing through the generous support of our colleagues across the Bay), the inestimably talented Ellen McLaughlin and the return of James Carpenter, a veteran of countless memorable productions at Berkeley Rep. What a luxury it is to watch them tell us their secrets… BACK TO TOP QUESTIONING IBSEN “I do but ask; my call is not to answer.” —Henrik Ibsen (1828—1906) When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing; They believe in everything. —Umberto Eco In Henrik Ibsen we see a man of almost unrelenting contradictions. He was a socialist and yet a royalist. He was obsessed with the radical demand for political and individual liberty, and yet for years he was claimed by the conservative party of Norway as “their” poet. He examined Scandinavian society minutely—but from a distance, during 27 years in self-imposed exile. He detested Society for forcing people to conform and live according to conventional expectations, and yet was obsessed with being renowned by and winning honors within that same Society. He is hailed for his “feminist” plays, but in later years he insisted he was not a feminist. He was intensely private, and yet suggested to his publisher that he offer a biographical sketch of what was going on in his life as a preface to each of his published scripts. He wrote feelingly about the consequences of illegitimate children and unfulfilled family relationships, yet he fathered out of wedlock a child he had virtually nothing to do with, and at the age of 22 unceremoniously broke off contact with his parents (in fact in his mother’s ailing years he twice promised to come visit her, and broke the promise both times). “He was like one who raises a people to revolt, and cannot lead them when revolted,” wrote Haldane MacFall, an early biographer. “He has the iron will but the doubting heart. He set up the worship of self—and came to doubt even that.” He was, to his credit, entirely aware of all the contradictions within himself, and it was his striving to come to terms with them that made him such a champion for self-realization. And yet it is dangerous to apply that label—or any label—to the man. Almost every defining comment ever made about him by a biographer or critic can be, and likely has been, refuted or contradicted by another biographer or critic just as insightful and familiar with his life and work. His dramatic writing, several of his biographers have suggested, is a sort of living Rorschach test, for each person to approach with their own prejudices and respond to according to those prejudices. To make absolute comments about his ideals or values is folly. He did not have an agenda, a belief system or a credo the way Tolstoy or other great thinkers of the age did. His task, he believed, was not to answer, but to question. In later life he was invited by a friend to become president of a social club and he declined with this explanation: “I have to tell you, I must always belong to the opposition.” He could have been speaking of his relationship to life and society in general. In a sense, Ghosts is the most Ibsenesque of Ibsen plays. Although a brilliant example of clarity and economy of story, it refuses to give pat answers to any of the various issues it addresses—all of which were incendiary when the play premiered. There is no way for us in the 21st century to begin to appreciate the uproar the play caused, for its outspokenness about taboo subjects and its seeming attack on the sanctity of marriage. The current social tension about marriage in today’s society almost pales in comparison; the only artistic parallel in living memory which can approach it (at a distance) is the furor over the 1989 exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in Cincinnati. Righteous wrath was leveled not only against the play and its creator, but against everyone who did not revile him for having written it. A London paper wrote, when Ghosts debuted there in April 1891, that “97 percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste, in exact proportion to their nastiness.” Ibsen was unprepared for such venom, but hardly disheartened, for he believed—as he later told the King of Sweden—“I HAD to write Ghosts.” It was, he felt, a necessary response to the furor caused by his previous play, A Doll’s House. At the end of A Doll’s House, Nora realizes her marriage (and therefore her life) is a sham and walks out on her husband and children in order to find out who she really is. Critics reviled him for creating a woman who could so abandon home and hearth. And so, “after Nora, Mrs. Alving had to follow,” Ibsen famously declared; Mrs. Alving is the woman who, upon realizing the sham, made the societally correct choice to stay the course. But Ghosts is far more than a rebuttal to criticism of A Doll’s House. It deals with many issues that society at the time could not bear to see broached publicly—including incest, syphilis, prostitution, the hypocrisy of the Church, adultery and illegitimacy. In bringing these issues to the stage, Ibsen was throwing in society’s face its own need to embrace cover-ups, its unwillingness to address (or even admit the existence of) real-life social problems. But he was not doing this to make a point. He was doing it because such circumstances have intrinsic dramatic fascination, and he was a dramatist. He was interested in character—in the real psychological struggle of real human beings finding themselves in impossible circumstances. He was among the first dramatists to bring these issues to the stage, and in doing so he brought them to the attention of the world at large. He was advocating on behalf of an international community dedicated to addressing real life with an honesty that had not been part of polite society at all. Psychology dealt with these issues but it was a nascent field, of interest mostly to the medical profession. Because of Ibsen’s plays, topics were discussed in salons, newspapers and tea-rooms that had never been discussed in such places before. For encouraging such open discourse, Ibsen was scorned by polite society, which equated questioning traditional values with actively seeking their ruin. Mrs. Alving asks Pastor Manders if we obey the laws of society because we respect them or because we fear them; moralists and ministers responded to this as if Ibsen himself were a malcontent trouble-maker, despite the fact that he himself obeyed the laws of society, and despite the fact he adamantly denied that any of the characters spoke for him. He never wavered in his assessment of himself as the one who questions, not the one who answers. In fact, late in his life, when he was asked by William Archer what happens after the curtain goes down on Ghosts, Ibsen, laughing, replied, “I don’t know. Everyone must work that out for himself.” BACK TO TOP HENRIK IBSEN “The Impossiblist,” as William Archer referred to Ibsen, was born in the coastal town of Skien, son of a prosperous merchant whose sudden bankruptcy interrupted Ibsen’s education. He was apprenticed to a pharmacist; later, he failed the entrance exams to train as a physician, and found himself earning a modest income as a writer. After being appointed a “stage poet” in 1851, he soon found himself running a small theatre in Bergen, where he wrote a series of plays that were concerned largely with Norwegian folklore and history. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thorensen, with whom he had a son, Sigurd, the following year (he had already fathered a child out of wedlock with a servant a dozen years earlier). His theatre went bankrupt a few years later. Growing disillusioned with his own country, Ibsen was assisted by friends who helped to secure a grant for him to travel abroad in 1864. This was the beginning of his self-imposed exile which lasted 27 years, most of which he spent in Italy and Germany. During this time he became, ironically, one of the most famous Norwegians alive. As an expatriate, he wrote the “realistic” plays that defined his middle years, and eventually developed the more introspective and symbolic style of drama that culminated in When We Dead Awaken. He moved back to Norway in 1891, settling in Christiana (now Oslo). He died in 1906, a few years after suffering a debilitating stroke. BACK TO TOP A PERFORMANCE HISTORY Ibsen wrote Ghosts in the summer of 1881; it was published in Norway that December. Although Ibsen was a celebrated success (most recently for the extremely controversial A Doll’s House), no theatre in Scandinavia would risk mounting such “pathological and titillating material.” In 1882, it had its premiere performance in, of all places, Chicago. In August of the following year it was finally given its European premiere in Sweden, with the young Swedish actor August Lindberg both directing and playing Osvald. He became obsessed with the project, visiting children’s syphilis wards in Copenhagen and suffering recurring nightmares from the whole experience. The play was received with wild enthusiasm and in 1890 it played in private theatres in Germany and France (the latter at the insistence of Emile Zola). Its single-performance British debut in 1891 lead to a histrionic outcry of moral indignation, although it was re-staged a few years later and attended by both Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury without ado. Ghosts has remained popular in the European repertoire, attracting the great Edvard Munch as a set designer in the 1906 Berlin production directed by Max Reinhardt. BACK TO TOP A CHRONOLOGY OF IBSEN PLAYS 1849: Cataline • 1853: St. John’s Night • 1855: Lady Inger of Østeraad • The Warrior’s Barrow • 1856: The Feast of Solhaug • 1857: Olaf Liljekrans • 1858: The Vikings at Helgeland • 1862: Love’s Comedy • 1863: The Pretenders • 1866: Brand • 1867: Peer Gynt • 1869: The League of Youth • 1873: Emperor and Galilean • 1877: Pillars of Society • 1879: A Doll’s House • 1881: Ghosts • 1882: An Enemy of the People • 1884: The Wild Duck • 1886: Rosmersholm • 1888: The Lady From the Sea • 1890: Hedda Gabler • 1891: The Master Builder • 1894: Little Eyolf • 1896: John Gabriel Borkman • 1899: When We Dead Awaken BACK TO TOP A SOCIAL DISEASE In late 19th century Europe, syphilis was seen as a scourge upon society. It evoked the same hysteria, stereotyping and paranoia that the AIDS epidemic did a century later. The infected were social outcasts and considered culpable for their own infection. A medical encyclopedia from the era indicated the dominant social perspective of the disease: “The contagion cannot be transmitted to the lower animals, man being the only animal subject to this loathsome and degrading disease…Illicit intercourse is responsible for the great proportion of cases, though the patient always declares that it has occurred accidentally. The lustful gratification of the passions is perhaps responsible for seventy-five percent of all cases.” In the 1870s, the moral and social implications of syphilis underwent a severe change with the scientific assertion that syphilis could be hereditary. As a general rule, medical wisdom held that only husbands (after debasing themselves with prostitutes) could bring syphilis into the home, where it was then transmitted to their honest wives—and therefore to their offspring. BACK TO TOP FROM THE DIARY OF THE DIRECTOR Get a glimpse into the world of a director as he delves into a new production. Jonathan Moscone, director of Ghosts, shares excerpts from his journal as he prepares to begin rehearsals for Ibsen’s Ghosts: Talked to Tony [Taccone] tonight about doing Ghosts. It was on my list of plays that I wanted to do. I know Ghosts shouldn’t be boring; why does it threaten to be so? Do I just hate words? Or is there something about the domesticity that confines my thinking. But this isn’t like Hedda or Doll’s House. The title is a clue. I wonder what the original Norwegian is. But Ghosts by the name of it signifies something behind, something larger, lurking. But what? Saw Neil Patel [the set designer] tonight. We talked about the play in the necessary vague terms after one good read each and really no vocabulary except the one we’ve developed over the years as friends, colleagues. Huge ceiling that extends into the audience. That’s basically what we settled on for now. It of course won’t be the final look, but it was a place to land at first sight. Neil did ask the question: what is the Ghost? I thought he might know, but it’s good to realize we’re both wondering. Of all the hinted-at taboos in the play, the title itself seems to elude a clear answer. I know that the past is the Ghost—dad. Great man, looming presence in the mind of the son, protected and reviled by the mother. Meeting with Scott Zielinski [the lighting designer] and Neil. Saw the ceiling idea. Beautiful but static. We took it all apart and rearranged the pieces to a room that doesn’t connect to itself but hides something. I love it. Scott asked what the Ghost was. I’m starting to wonder if I’m the right person for this play. We agreed that there was something to hide but we didn’t know what, and we would leave it at that for now. And then the sunrise. Only the lighting designer would ask that question. Which is amazing that Neil and I didn’t touch it at our first meeting, as it seems to be the major theatrical event of the play. The literalization of the metaphor. We decided it would be interesting to reveal more of the set as the play went on, resulting in an open space, no walls, no barriers, the truth is out there, but still the question, what is revealed behind it all? Not an empty space. This isn’t Our Town. Plus empty spaces have lost their meaning to me. Put something out there, I think. But what? The sun. The son. Sunrises are beautiful by nature, and signify a new day, seeing things clearly, waking up. But it happens right when Osvald’s brain goes to mush and the morphine is there for mom to give to him. First of all, why can’t he do it himself? Is this like Cymbeline where Imogen cannot kill herself because it is against the rules of religion? Or is there something else going on here? Surely Osvald can have anyone kill him. Why must it be mom? Is it her in his head before he goes to Regina? Is that why he comes home? Is it sexualized need from long ago? This is scary stuff. Ellen McLaughlin accepted [the role of Mrs. Alving]. And Jim Carpenter, Brian Keith Russell and Emily Ackerman have all been cast. Fantastic. Final callbacks for the sun. Ran Davis Duffield through a gauntlet during his audition. We were on the Roda Stage and that is one mother of a space. Beautiful but demanding. I got him to move in large ways, taking things out to the audience, strong physical choices. He went everywhere with it. He’s hungry and nimble, and feels young and right for the role. Osvald must be wild, sexy, attracting the women of the play, scaring the one man who is working desperately to repress his sexuality, Manders. He should also be dangerous. He’s an artist. Is that what the house is hiding? The creative mind? The artist? Neil has put an El Greco behind the set. I told him to blow it up so it overwhelmed the space, the people, and that might make it more abstract. And a little door up center [stage]. Through it, what? Perhaps the painting should feel like Osvald painted it, since he is after all, a painter. No—too on the money. Stick with not dotting every I. Let actors and audience do some of the work. Or a lot. Neil told me about an Icelandic group—Sigur Rós. He thinks it would be perfect for what we’re doing. Called Jake Rodriguez [the sound designer], ran it by him. He loves their music. Finally Meg Neville [the costume designer] and I meet. Am somehow convinced that verisimilitude in the clothing is the way to go. Am tired of simplifying clothes. Would that be interesting with the semi-real walls? No molding except door and window? Don’t know. Big question. Meg loves the idea. We have no money. Hmmmm. Perhaps rehearsal clothes. No, too artful. Maybe one costume for everyone—that’s good. Mom must look fabulous but restrained. Son—sexy sexy. Regina is a maid. Can’t get away from that. Don’t want Manders in black. White would be better. But that’s a summertime color. White would be great. But the weather’s pretty damp so it feels like fall or something so white won’t be right. Jake loves Sigur Rós. Gave me CDs. OH MY GOD. So sensual, deep, progressive, modern without losing connection to the length of movements in symphonic works. Sigur Rós in the SUV. Ideas a’popping. The music makes me think of what’s underneath it all. Sex, desire, scary, beautiful. The sun. Beautiful but makes us see and her [Mrs. Alving] see the truth. He’s dying of syphilis, and she didn’t make it happen, but she did not tell the truth. She’s like the über-mom. Protecting herself by protecting her children. Doing her best but still doing the worst. But for some reason the blame doesn’t feel like hers. She was taught wrong. Advised wrong. Only now is she reading books. Always the question: WHY NOW? It’s Osvald. He’s like an animal who’s come home to die. Aren’t there animals that do that? Maybe humans do that. This play made me cry in the car today. The Sigur Rós unlocked Ibsen for me. So did my assistant director, Jonathan, whom I met a couple of days ago. Loves the play and saw Ingmar Bergman’s version at BAM. Today I got Bergman’s program notes where he writes that he released Ibsen from the iron corsets. That to do the play now, you have no choice. Big sigh of relief. That’s what I’ve been feeling, and it’s good to know Ingmar agrees. If you’re going to stand behind someone, he’s as good as you’re going to get. Random thought: the set, Sigur Rós, Norway, it’s all so foreign. And I think that should be embraced. The clothes support that. The set feels like Winter Light. The music. The names should be pronounced Norwegian. I think. Authenticity in approaching the play as a distant foreigner. Otherness. Sat in the Roda Theatre today. I love it, and it informs the size and theatricality of the world I need to create. Theatre should be more like opera. Opera more like theatre. Unlock that corset. The ending is painful. We’ll have to go into some deep places. The event should take the time that it needs. We need to make the event of her choosing what to do palpable. The Ghost is the truth. The truth in the theatre is theatre itself. The production will reach for that. BACK TO TOP THE ART BEHIND THE ACTORS: HOW A VIBRANT PAINTING COMES ALIVE Imagine someone asking you to create a 30 feet tall by 54 feet wide painting to span the entire back wall of the Roda stage. And not just any painting, mind you, but a reproduction of an El Greco, an enormous mass of twisting colors forming the Resurrection. How do you begin this daunting task? What does it take to create a painting so epic that it becomes an essential piece of the play? WHO it takes is Lisa Lazar, Berkeley Rep’s head scenic artist, and her team of five scenic painters to construct the artwork that ends Ibsen’s classic with a haunting image. The following is an interview with Lisa Lazar about the creation of the set for Ghosts, followed by amazing facts about the set piece and her team assembled: Q: How long have you worked at Berkeley Rep and how did you arrive at this position? LISA: This is my second season as “scenic charge” (how’s that for a jargon-y title) at Berkeley Rep. I had been painting scenery for theatres around the country, and met Berkeley Rep’s production manager when I was running the paint shop at Dallas Theater Center. When the position opened up at Berkeley Rep, he encouraged me to apply for the job. Q: What other projects stand out in your career that patrons could identify you by? LISA: Berkeley Rep audience members will probably remember the translucent greenhouse I painted for Suddenly Last Summer. Scenic designer Annie Smart came up with the amazing image of the gigantic see-through foliage, and it was up to me to figure out how to paint it. I spent about three weeks making samples, and can now speak definitively about all the products and techniques that WON’T get the job done. I ended up using stained glass paint and an auto-body spray gun to paint the set. Q: What is the largest scale painting you have worked on? LISA: This drop is the largest pictorial project I’ve worked on yet. We couldn’t fit the fabric we’re painting in my paint shop, so we’re painting in the rehearsal hall for the California Shakespeare Theater. (Good thing their artistic director is directing Ghosts!) Q: How does the relationship with the designers usually work? LISA: The designers (along with the directors) come up with the artistic vision for the show. It is the job of the scenic artist, technical director, costume director and all the other production department heads to figure out how to realize their vision. In terms of scenery, the designer will make a scale model of the set, and do detailed draftings, and then the technical directors and I have to figure out how to create the set. My responsibilities may include painting, carving or texturing scenery. I also have to balance issues of budget, workers’ safety and scheduling. I have to be sure that my paint jobs will hold up to eight shows a week. Since the individual pieces of the Ghosts set were so huge and didn’t fit into our shop, we did a lot of the painting on the Roda stage. Of course, Berkeley Rep presents much more than our own season, so the painters had to work around all sorts of other events going on onstage. Since Berkeley Rep is doing an increasing number of co-productions with other theaters in the U.S. and abroad, the scenic artist has to be able to send enough information for their counterparts at other theatres to touch up, repair or add to other shows. Last season’s production of Fräulein Else went to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, CA, the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT and the McCarter in Princeton, NJ. We sent along detailed instructions on all the surface treatments—how to paint the “funeral grass” that Else plays tennis on, where to get the pebbles for the path, and what kind of glue we used so that the pebbles won’t drop into the elevator that lifts up Else’s bed. Q: Your favorite project/anecdote/moment in the business? LISA: In addition to running the paint shop for Berkeley Rep, I also do the same thing for the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY every summer. I painted a Baroque opera a few summers ago, where the nymphs and shepherds were all dressed in 1950s beach wear, and the pastoral landscape was totally encrusted in green and blue glitter. My painters and I spent hour upon hour sprinkling glitter, and every night the audiences burst into delighted laughter when they got their first glimpse of the performers on the set. How’s that for gratifying? MORE ABOUT THE PAINTING Before any painting occurs, the bare fabric drop is prepared with corn starch. The scenic artists break down a small image of the original El Greco painting into sections and draw them onto sheets of paper; each sheet of paper is 30 feet tall and 12 feet wide. It takes two days to lay down the base coat on the El Greco drop. Meanwhile, the paper drawings are completed and perforated with special tools called pounce wheels, then are laid on top of the fabric of the drop itself once the base coat is dry, and powdered charcoal is rubbed through the holes in order to transfer the image from the drawing to the fabric. Designer Neil Patel meets with the scenic artists, who by this time have extremely tired forearms. After the meeting, Lisa paints in the major area of dark on top of the charcoal outline. The next day she lays in base color for several figures within the drawing and mixes the next set of colors needed. Emily and Lisa begin laying in middle tones to start filling in the broad details of the painting. Everyone is getting quite a workout. The team is working not only on the painting, but on the rest of the enormous set. Simultaneously and with definite time constraints, they work on the walls, floor and other set pieces as well as the enormous El Greco. Next comes shadowing and highlights on the canvas. During this process, the painters have to try to keep in mind the entire canvas’ image instead of the tiny chunk they can see at any one time while working. Adjustments must be made to the drawing on the drop. Some parts of the figures seem to be wandering so the artists correct things going astray. Lisa and the crew try to keep a loose “painterly” approach to the El Greco drop. Keeping everything in perspective is made possible with the help of a ladder. The El Greco drop was started on January 26 and is completed on February 17 (at least the painting portion of the process). After it’s dried, the 800 staples holding the drop to the floor are removed and fabric ties are attached on the top of the painting. The drop is folded up for transport. The artists wrangle the drop to the Roda Theatre where the carpenters begin installation of the drop on the stage. All the other scenery is loaded in and technical rehearsals begin. BACK TO TOP