Afternoon at the theater ...

I am on vacation this week and yesterday my wife and I traveled to Manhattan to see a fine production of Henrik Ibsen's great play The Master Builder at The Pearl Theatre Company in the East Village. If you feel starved, as I often do, for real drama, classical drama -- as opposed to the ax-grinding sermonettes so many theaters seem compelled to stage -- then consider a subscription to this company. My wife and I sure are: Following the Ibsen run, they'll be staging plays by Wycherley (The Gentleman Dancing Master), Euripides (Hecuba), Shakespeare (Measure for Measure) and Schiller (Mary Stuart).
The weather made traveling less than pleasant yesterday, but it was worth it, the play was so well done, perfectly paced and without any cutesy-pie contemporary spin (a very smart move -- Ibsen wasn't just ahead of his own time; he looks as if he's even ahead of ours).
The actors all have a sound grasp of their parts, so the ensemble work is excellent. But it's the three central roles -- Halvard Solness, the master builder; Aline, his wife; and Hilda Wangel, the young woman who fatefully re-enters his life -- who give this play its strange power, and Dan Daily as Solness, Robin Leslie Brown as Aline, and Michele Vazquez as Hilda are fully up to their tasks. Brown is both chilling and heartbreaking as a woman whose very soul has been paralyzed by grief. The scene where she tells Hilda of her dolls -- destroyed in the fire that destroyed the house she grew up in, and which she still played with even after her marriage to Solness -- is touching and wrenching at the same time. As for Vazquez, she brings just the right measure of coquettish passion to what is a very ambiguous role. It's certainly easy to believe she could inspire an aging architect to risk his life to please and impress her. Then there's Solness: Daily captures not only his confident charm and ruthless imperiousness, but also the insecurity beneath the pluck. But he captures something more: the terror that lies at the heart of this man's existential drama. When Solness tells Hilda of what really went on that day she saw him place a wreath -- for the first and only time -- at the topmost point of the building -- a church -- that he had just finished, it is really scary: Solness has defied God -- and has been pursued by Him ever since. So Hilda is a kind of angel -- and an angel is messenger from God.
I could go on on and on about The Master Builder, which I first read in college, but had never seen staged until yesterday. When I first read it, I was a young man with artistic aspirations; now I'm an aging man with no illusions, and few aspirations left. Seeing it had a strange effect on me, which I will have to mull a bit before I get a handle on it -- if I can get a handle on it.
Saturday night, my wife and I are going to see another Ibsen play: The Lady From the Sea. This was the first of Ibsen's late plays, in which symbolism became an integral part of his work. Interestingly, Hilda Wangel is one of the characters in The Lady From the Sea. So I'll get to see what she was like as a child.