Arts Listings

A man, holed up in a room above the parlor of his home after a financial scandal, once so popular the whole country called him by his first name. Twin sisters who have loved him, one his bitter wife, competing for the loyalty of his gay blade son, himself led in tow by a young widow. The shamed man's last loyal ally, an awkward, would-be poet, the only one who visits him in his upstairs exile ...A man, holed up in a room above the parlor of his home after a financial scandal, once so popular the whole country called him by his first name. Twin sisters who have loved him, one his bitter wife, competing for the loyalty of his gay blade son, himself led in tow by a young widow. The shamed man's last loyal ally, an awkward, would-be poet, the only one who visits him in his upstairs exile ... 

A quick look at the dramatis personae of John Gabriel Borkman , now onstage at the Aurora, directed by Barbara Oliver, could give the impression of a soap opera, or something on the borders of burlesque melodrama, even camp, like a Douglas Sirk flick ... 

But John Gabriel is a late Ibsen piece, something which plays off melodrama, the popular theater that ran on the bigger-than-life talents of the "cabotin" (hammy, grandiose) actors of the 19th century. It milks the tangled plot in a different way, with all the poetic imagination and ear for language Ibsen had tamed to focus on everyday reality, the truth of social and personal relationships, and of individuals' sense of themselves, showing them flirting with melodrama and purple poetry in their endless avowals of high purpose to others and themselves. 

The scene which best displays this side of Ibsen's prodigious talent in Aurora's production is Wilhelm's visit to the solitary John Gabriel, by turns diffident, problematic and strangely humorous. Jack Powell—an excellent character actor, native to the Bay Area, not seen on local stages enough—shines as the loyal, puzzled poet manqué, and brings out the best in that fine actor James Carpenter as John Gabriel himself, the impenitent lone wolf. Powell appears again, just as brilliantly, near the end, after getting run over by a sleigh speeding away with his daughter, unbeknownst to him, accompanying young Erhart Borkman and his merry widow, Mrs. Wilton, to some vague picture of happiness outside the dire tale that has unfolded onstage. 

This close-knit drama of ambiguity, of what's said and unsaid, of what has happened in the past or is often acted out offstage, is too elusive yet wordy for some. Indeed, one reviewer complained that, despite a fine production, the play hadn't aged well. 

But the problem with John Gabriel at the Aurora isn't Ibsen's. Riding on anachronism, on a parallelism between Borkman's dream of power that leads to disaster and Bernie Madoff, the Aurora production may have assumed a facileness of interpretation that skirted the intricacies of what Ibsen clearly intended in his scrutiny of middle class souls in a capitalistic society with an ostensibly individualist culture. 

Despite the presence onstage of three distinguished actors—Carpenter , whose success in the Aurora's production of Ibsen's Master Builder a few years back raised expectations for John Gabriel ; Karen Grassle as Mrs. Borkman and Karen Lewis, whom theatergoers may recall as Karen Ingenthron at Berkeley Rep early on—the show ironically slides into the melodrama Ibsen merely flirted with. There's little real irony onstage here, and the acting is oddly stiff, even when it seems to get florid. A perfectly good snowstorm, one of the set-pieces of the Victorian period (The Little Matchgirl, Way Down East , among others), is wasted. There's not even a good cry for the audience. 

David Eldridge's clumsy, over-wordy adaptation doesn't help in the struggle toward theater. Besides pursuing false cognates, the overwrought attempt to preserve elaborate, antiquated forms of address misses the point of the actual, colloquial meaning—past and present—of much of the text, not to mention what's left unsaid ... again, Ibsen's famous irony. 

It doesn't help scenes like the opening one, when the Nordic diffidence of one woman's grave entry into another's parlor and the slow cat-and-mouse game they play like two over-polite strangers, before the audience realizes with a jolt midway what their true, intimate relationship is, and what they want from each other, is reduced in its gravity by overly elaborated lines, meant to convey stuffy platitudes, that have to be recited in moderate tempo like chit-chat to make it through a 25-minute scene without losing the audience completely. (If the tempo had been stepped up, maybe it could have drawn a laugh or two as a Norweigen Ionesco.) There's a difference between a play that hasn't aged well and a masterpiece that isn't translated and adapted for a very different audience's expectations over a century after its debut. 

(The stage direction of the first scene doesn't help either, with the dragging, yet distracted, quality of the dialogue overly offset by a funny centrifugal force: Borkman's eerie, solitary presence upstairs, meant to be conveyed by occasional sounds, inference and references in the women's dialogue, shown upstage on a split-level set of his room, with Carpenter, an actor with real presence, distracting from the women's scene together by doing nothing.) 

Besides Powell's personal triumph as Wilhelm, Carpenter's scene with him and occasional moments with Lewis that at least touch on pathos, only Pamela Gaye Walker as wry, sly Mrs. Wilton gets any traction with the ingenuously presented entropy Ibsen meant to anatomize. Aaron Wilton is miscast as empty and unconsciously hurtful butterfly Erhart. 

It's a difficult play, but—except in flashes—one might not even divine that from Aurora's sad production. 

A quick look at the dramatis personae of John Gabriel Borkman , now onstage at the Aurora, directed by Barbara Oliver, could give the impression of a soap opera, or something on the borders of burlesque melodrama, even camp, like a Douglas Sirk flick ... 

But John Gabriel is a late Ibsen piece, something which plays off melodrama, the popular theater that ran on the bigger-than-life talents of the "cabotin" (hammy, grandiose) actors of the 19th century. It milks the tangled plot in a different way, with all the poetic imagination and ear for language Ibsen had tamed to focus on everyday reality, the truth of social and personal relationships, and of individuals' sense of themselves, showing them flirting with melodrama and purple poetry in their endless avowals of high purpose to others and themselves. 

The scene which best displays this side of Ibsen's prodigious talent in Aurora's production is Wilhelm's visit to the solitary John Gabriel, by turns diffident, problematic and strangely humorous. Jack Powell—an excellent character actor, native to the Bay Area, not seen on local stages enough—shines as the loyal, puzzled poet manqué, and brings out the best in that fine actor James Carpenter as John Gabriel himself, the impenitent lone wolf. Powell appears again, just as brilliantly, near the end, after getting run over by a sleigh speeding away with his daughter, unbeknownst to him, accompanying young Erhart Borkman and his merry widow, Mrs. Wilton, to some vague picture of happiness outside the dire tale that has unfolded onstage. 

This close-knit drama of ambiguity, of what's said and unsaid, of what has happened in the past or is often acted out offstage, is too elusive yet wordy for some. Indeed, one reviewer complained that, despite a fine production, the play hadn't aged well. 

But the problem with John Gabriel at the Aurora isn't Ibsen's. Riding on anachronism, on a parallelism between Borkman's dream of power that leads to disaster and Bernie Madoff, the Aurora production may have assumed a facileness of interpretation that skirted the intricacies of what Ibsen clearly intended in his scrutiny of middle class souls in a capitalistic society with an ostensibly individualist culture. 

Despite the presence onstage of three distinguished actors—Carpenter , whose success in the Aurora's production of Ibsen's Master Builder a few years back raised expectations for John Gabriel ; Karen Grassle as Mrs. Borkman and Karen Lewis, whom theatergoers may recall as Karen Ingenthron at Berkeley Rep early on—the show ironically slides into the melodrama Ibsen merely flirted with. There's little real irony onstage here, and the acting is oddly stiff, even when it seems to get florid. A perfectly good snowstorm, one of the set-pieces of the Victorian period (The Little Matchgirl, Way Down East , among others), is wasted. There's not even a good cry for the audience. 

David Eldridge's clumsy, over-wordy adaptation doesn't help in the struggle toward theater. Besides pursuing false cognates, the overwrought attempt to preserve elaborate, antiquated forms of address misses the point of the actual, colloquial meaning—past and present—of much of the text, not to mention what's left unsaid ... again, Ibsen's famous irony. 

It doesn't help scenes like the opening one, when the Nordic diffidence of one woman's grave entry into another's parlor and the slow cat-and-mouse game they play like two over-polite strangers, before the audience realizes with a jolt midway what their true, intimate relationship is, and what they want from each other, is reduced in its gravity by overly elaborated lines, meant to convey stuffy platitudes, that have to be recited in moderate tempo like chit-chat to make it through a 25-minute scene without losing the audience completely. (If the tempo had been stepped up, maybe it could have drawn a laugh or two as a Norweigen Ionesco.) There's a difference between a play that hasn't aged well and a masterpiece that isn't translated and adapted for a very different audience's expectations over a century after its debut. 

(The stage direction of the first scene doesn't help either, with the dragging, yet distracted, quality of the dialogue overly offset by a funny centrifugal force: Borkman's eerie, solitary presence upstairs, meant to be conveyed by occasional sounds, inference and references in the women's dialogue, shown upstage on a split-level set of his room, with Carpenter, an actor with real presence, distracting from the women's scene together--by doing nothing.) 

Besides Powell's personal triumph as Wilhelm, Carpenter's scene with him and occasional moments with Lewis that at least touch on pathos, only Pamela Gaye Walker as wry, sly Mrs. Wilton gets any traction with the ingenuously presented entropy Ibsen meant to anatomize. Aaron Wilton is miscast as empty and unconsciously hurtful butterfly Erhart. 

It's a difficult play, but--except in flashes--one might not even divine that from Aurora's sad production.