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Making a Scene

A harrowing but essential evening of theater at New York Theater Workshop

One of the most harrowing theater pieces I’ve had the recent privilege to experience just finished its run at the New York Theatre Workshop. Scenes From a Marriage, based on the film and television miniseries by Ingmar Bergman, closed this past weekend, but it will not leave the consciousness of those who’ve experienced it for a very long time. I hope it travels elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world; it deserves to find larger audience, and, by its nature, cannot do so except by doing what it does again and again in similarly intimate spaces. In the meantime, I hope I can do the experience some justice by description.

I was nervous about the idea adapting Bergman’s film for the stage, for two reasons. First, although I found it an incredibly powerful work when I first saw it a year or so ago, the film is very much a product of the 1970s, and I worried that presenting it on the stage four decades later would make it feel like a period piece. Second, while this is a very talky film, Bergman is such a cinematic director, so compositional, that I feared for what would happen without him to direct our eye.

I needn’t have worried. Ivo Van Hove’s production (of a English text adaptation by Emily Mann) dealt very cleverly with both problems, creating and populating a theatrical space that deftly communicated universality without ever sacrificing specificity. First of all, he divided the first half of the story, leading up to the breakup of the marriage, into three scenes that play concurrently, by three different couples, in three different portions of a triangular space. There’s a great deal of shouting and door-slamming in this play, so we overhear the more heated portions of the other scenes even as we’re watching our own segment of marital trauma. And through windows we can see into an inner triangle of space that characters may flee to or emerge from.

One consequence of splitting our couple in three – and three very different couples in terms of both physical and personality type – is that the audience can process them simultaneously as three different couples, but also as the same couple at different points in a relationship breaking down. The three scenes also play two ways: as successive points in a line of descent into divorce but also as parallel “origin stories” explaining where things went wrong. This is particularly the case because the audience is also divided in three, so they will see the scenes in any of three possible orders. And because the scenes bleed into one another, the parallelism operates in time as well as space. These are three couples; they are one couple; they are all couples – these scenes happen in order; in no order; they all at once and always.

Each of the scenes provides adequate explanation for the marriage’s end. At one scene, a dinner party collapses when the visiting couple get drunk and have a screaming row. In the aftermath, the very girlish-seeming wife (Susannah Flood) reveals to her hipster husband (Alex Hurt) that she has gotten pregnant again – something he had thought she was taking the necessary precautions to prevent. Dancing between the possibilities of keeping the child or having an abortion, the husband steers his partner with increasing firmness toward the latter choice, one the wife suspects she’ll never get over.

At another, in the marital bedroom, a much older seeming husband (Arliss Howard) comes home to announce that he’s leaving his shocked wife (Tina Benko, who I cannot in a million years imagine wanting to leave) – the next morning – to go to Paris with his mistress. He has no particular hope of happiness from this choice, but at least he’ll escape what has become an unendurable misery. And at the third – the second, in terms of the story’s chronology; the first, in terms of my own experience of the piece; and the most-difficult for me personally to endure – an anxious and sexually closed-down wife (Roslyn Ruff) and a bored and resigned husband (Dallas Roberts) tiptoe around the silences that have come to dominate their lives together, each gesture by either toward seriously confronting the empty heart of their marriage triggering a sudden ferocity in the other.

As another gesture toward universality, both place and time are cheerfully indeterminate. The land-line telephones are of a pre-AT&T-breakup vintage, but the husband carries an iPhone, which he reads rather than coming to bed with his wife. Costumes have elements that recall the 1970s (Benko’s jeans, Ruff’s dress) and elements that seem more contemporary, without ever declaring firmly for either. There are lifestyle elements that seem to suggest a Swedish locale, while others wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn. Hove never calls attention to any of these ambiguities; he simply lets them be. The effect is something like a good modern-dress production of Shakespeare: we simply don’t think about the history or sociology, and focus on the characters.

The emotional violence of the piece, and the audacity of its staging, reach their peaks in act two, in a brilliant variation on the first act’s triptych. The audience returns from intermission to find the thin, temporary walls that separated the three scenes of Act I have come down, revealing a larger triangular space, wherein we will see this couple’s marriage finally come to an end. Wife and husband (now bereft of his mistress) meet in her office to sign the papers and finally complete their divorce. But, after a bit of reminiscing, a bit of sexual revisiting, and a bit of recrimination, the husband declares that he won’t sign. Things spiral downward from there, until we have to watch as the husband, by now quite drunk, becomes outright violent, dragging his wife across the room, throttling her, and of course spewing all kinds of verbal abuse as he does so.

And we have to watch this horrific scene three times at once, as each of the three couples we met in Act I is present in that room together, playing out the same scene, but differently, each as their particular personalities imply they would – occasionally even switching partners in the middle. Amazingly enough, instead of a cacophony, what emerges from the echoing and reverberating lines is music. That combination of specificity and multiplicity, the same lines given different readings by different men and women, flowing over one another in a kind of wretched fugue – if Hove wanted to communicate that this scene is essential to the human condition in marriage, I can’t imagine a better way to do it.

Only three scenes, that I recall, break this fugal pattern. In Act I, the wife (Ruff) meets with an older client (Mia Katigbak) to discuss her divorce. (The wife is a divorce lawyer, a fact she comments on bitterly as she is trapped in her office with her abusive husband – how many times has she advised her clients not to put themselves in such a vulnerable situation?) Why does she want one? Because there is no love in her marriage, and never has been. The scene is a bleak one – the woman has no hope of happiness, she just wants to escape a particular misery that she finds no longer bearable. Then, in Act II, a different wifely avatar (Benko) meets with her mother (played again by Mia Katigbak) to ask about her marriage to her husband, the wife’s father, now-deceased. And, lo and behold, she also didn’t really think she loved him – the love of her life was another man, but what can you do. And then the daughter asks her why she was so unsupportive through her painful divorce, and her mother answers: I don’t remember it that way. It’s an awkward dance of closeness and distance, but that tone of renouncing love, and that renunciation being somehow part of marriage, at least for this older generation, tolls ominously throughout.

And finally, in the last scene of the play, we see the couple (played by Benko and Howard), meeting for an annual tryst, a ritual they’ve settled into years after their divorces and remarriages. For the first time, they are comfortable with each other – physically and emotionally. They’ve become friends. They can talk to each other. The wife says at one point that this is the very thing that is essentially absent from marriage – she’s very happy with her new husband, loves him, has a great sex life with him, etc. But she just can’t talk to her spouse the way she can to her ex-husband, now that he is her ex-husband. The stakes are too high. Too much honesty can do too much damage.

As I write this, and think about the play, it sounds like I’m saying the play is making a “case” against marriage. And I don’t think that’s true. First of all, it’s a play, not a brief; it isn’t making a case for or against anything. But if it is making a case, it’s the painful one that the things we want, that we crave most deeply, may be mutually incompatible. We want love, both erotic and familial. We want friendship, the kind where you can reveal yourself safely, over and over again, without fear of destroying that bond. And we want the fundamentally inextricable bond that we call marriage, that ties two people together in ways that can never really be unraveled. And these things get in each other’s way. The knot that cannot be untied can fray, and can be cut, and fear over its fragility inhibits the honesty essential to friendship. Meanwhile, the very comforts of friendship can mute the intensity of erotic desire.

Marriage is full of scenes – perhaps we have to play them out in order for the marriage to breathe, and live, and grow. But play them badly, and you may find yourself on an empty stage, with an empty bottle, and a sheaf of papers.

 

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