Peer Gynt

The Adams House Drama Society pushed every button, pulled every level, manipulated every winch and pulley that the Loeb Pleasure Palace houses in its bottomless toy box, in an immense and elaborate hymn to tedium. Peer Gynt fell--like the silly feathered pig which makes an agonizing descent from the rafters (while the actors stand and star, speechless)--with a long long, oh so long thud. (Three long hours.)

Eric Martin's set was the only evidence that someone had thought about the play. The stage is an enormous disk, tilted toward the audience and partly surrounded by a cyclorama, on which is projected a series of wonderfully evocative slides. I have never seen, on any amateur stage, such a beautiful and effective set; I have never seen, anywhere, such disparity between the stage and the staging. The blocking, the lighting, the choreography, the props--all were designed for a rectangular stage, and not very imaginatively designed at that. And the monotonous drone of the music--the same for a wedding dance, with the dancers half-heartedly beating out no rhythm in particular, as for a dirge--made me wish for happy deafness.

And deafness wouldn't have mattered, really, since so much of the dialogue was inaudible. In the scene at the Royal Hall of the Troll King, Peer Gynt, the Troll King, and the Troll King's daughter stood at the rear of the stage, while at the front the trolls cavorted, pretending to be Harpo Marx. They whistled, grunted, beeped, honked, groaned and gasped--did everything they could, in fact, to ensure the audience's missing the dialogue.

Paul Ronder, who directed, apparently believed that Ibsen hadn't put quite enough sex into Peer Gynt, so he added some. Early in the play, Peer is supposed to be picked up by three lascivious young ladies, all of whose desires he satisfies in the course of an evening. Ibsen leaves the actual act of intercourse to the imagination of the audience by having Peer and the vixens dance off stage together. Not so Ronder. Three young ladies, self-consciously displaying their breasts, crawled all over poor Peer, who lay at the front of the stage. At the end of the scene, one of the young ladies danced to the left of the disk and daintily disappeared down the stairs, the second danced to the right and did the same, and the third danced to the center of the disk, discovered there werezno stairs, glanced about, danced to the left, and finally, thank God, was gone.

The inaudible dialogue, the invisible actors (they studiously avoided the spots of light in which they were supposed to stand), the embarrassing moments of silence (while actors waited for props to descend from the ceiling), the inappropriate music, the stiff and ungainly choreography--all might have been bearable had there been any actors on stage who knew what they were doing.

Thomas Griffin played the title role with all the gusto of a "Beat" "Method" actor playing himself. There was no appreciable difference between the young Peer Gynt, the middle aged Peer Gynt, and the tired, old Peer Gynt. A part of the trouble was that he wore almost no makeup (how a twenty year old actor is supposed to look sixty without the help of makeup beats me), but a more significant trouble was that he had no sense of his physical presence on the stage. His voice never varied, his posture never changed; he was dwarfed by the set. In one of the two or three almost effective scenes in the production, Griffin had only to stand still and be silhouetted against the cyclorama. He couldn't even do that; he twitched and shuffled and glanced again and again at some mysterious object he was holding in his hand. The script?

It would be absurd to talk about the play, one of Ibsen's greatest dramatic poems, since Ronder offered no interpretation of it at the Loeb. The mad scene was the only really effective one in the badly paced and chaotic production, and it is a pity that I must recommend that it be missed.