If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist?
I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself.
His excess of rage found its way into plays — “Miss Julie” (1888) and “The Dance of Death” (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive.
The contradiction is at its most vexing in “Creditors,” a follow-up to “Miss Julie” that flips the earlier play’s love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense.
That “Creditors” is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play’s balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman’s thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account.
The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of “dead languages,” are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi’s professional failures, connecting them to Tekla’s galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what’s to stop her from doing the same to her second?
The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them “The Roommate,” “The Moors” and “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg’s three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought.
But this is where the adaptation begins a slow turn. As written, and as played quite winningly by Siff, Silverman’s Tekla is neither a kitten nor a harridan. She is confident and positive and, quite obviously, in love with her husband, at least as she has known him until now. Still, alert to his newfound possessiveness and jealousy, which eventually expresses itself in an act of violence, she draws a line in the sand of their marriage.
The act of violence, so viscerally damning, is not in the Strindberg. But the fragility of traditional marriage certainly is, and Silverman underlines it. Every feeling and its opposite are readily available to either partner, so that even a slight disruption of their equilibrium can result in wild swings toward loathing. Adi sputters; Tekla snarls. What he once loved in her, and vice versa, quickly becomes what neither can abide.
Still, in this version, Tekla remains the more sensible spouse, far abler in dealing with disputes. Her strength is further tested when she is forced, in the third part, into a final face-off with Gustav, the expert underminer. In the Strindberg, Gustav is coolly victorious; he destroys Tekla emotionally and her husband physically. That’s almost the reverse of what happens now, both in plot and tone. Not cool at all, Schreiber’s fascinatingly peculiar Gustav is incandescent with wrath, but also deeply depressed. How Silverman uses this to argue for the antithesis of Strindbergian revenge makes for a weird if wonderfully surprising kicker.
Some will complain that this “Creditors” is therefore not Strindberg at all, that Silverman’s alterations run directly counter to his intentions. Both statements are true, but I’m not sure why they have to be criticisms. Yes, something of the brisk inevitability of the original is lost in the revision’s strengthening of Tekla and softening of the others, and yes, the dialogue leans occasionally into feminist sloganeering. There is even a nod toward a form of marriage that the original, even if it imagined it, could not have dramatized.
But the play is, as Silverman pointedly puts it on the title page of the script, “after Strindberg” — more than 135 years after. If it detracts from “Creditors” or its bleak realism about men and women, no harm done; the original still exists. And if it instead enhances “Creditors” for contemporary audiences and refutes a false idea about men and women, it may do some good.
Certainly Ian Rickson’s direction does. His “Creditors” staging is as trenchant, smooth and unburdened by overproduction as is his concurrent staging of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes” with Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty. (The two shows alternate at the Minetta Lane through June 18.) The same design team — sets by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones, costumes by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, lighting by Isabella Byrd, sound by Mikaal Sulaiman — achieves a similar less-is-more effect, supporting the story without becoming the story. The understated visuals do for the eyes what the sonic hush (there are no microphones) does for the ears, forcing the audience to concentrate on the words and to find the spectacle within them.
The specific merits of “Creditors,” numerous though they are, are similarly in service to something larger. Like “Sexual Misconduct,” it is part of an experiment called Audible x Together, which aims to reinvigorate the Off Broadway ideal of engaging theater with excellent actors for diverse audiences at reasonable prices. Though half of the 400 seats for any single performance are sold at market rates — and it must be said that the market is not, in fact, very reasonable — a quarter are given free to community groups through the Theater Development Fund and a quarter cost $35 if you can find them.
Quibble with the model; pick at the play. But in imagining a way forward instead of whimpering in despair, Audible x Together is doing something akin to what Silverman does with “Creditors.” You might say they both look for the value in the past but don’t get stuck in it. They play it forward.
Creditors
Through June 18 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audiblexminetta.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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