Hate and Marriage

By L. M.

THE DANCE OF DEATH by AUGUST STRINDBERG

In Strindberg's obsession, any relationship between the sexes tended to take on the character of a Hundred Years' War--there might be some redemptive moments, some victories, but mostly it would be nasty, brutish and nearly interminable. Marriage became a sort of ugly paradigm of the human condition.

The Dance of Death is one of the most concentrated visions of unmitigated nastiness ever staged. Edward, a drunken, boorish army captain, lives with his venomous wife Alice in an island fortress off the bleak coast of Sweden. Bills go unpaid, the paint peels, and their children--small wonder--avoid them. They approach their silver wedding anniversary with only an astonished resentment that each could have deprived the other of so much of life.

Strindberg wrote The Dance of Death in two parts; as is becoming customary with this play, Director AJ. Antoon is staging only the first part in this production at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Despite a distinguished cast, this is a narrowly drawn onenote, or perhaps two-note kind of performance. It mixes rage and exhaustion the way old club fighters hack away and then fall into each other's clinch, softly drubbing the kidneys, to rest for a little while. (A few years ago, Friedrich Duerrenmatt staged The Dance of Death literally as a boxing match.)

Dark Laughter. Robert Shaw as the bullet-headed lout begins by screaming something as subtle as "Shut up, for Christ's sake!" Zoe Caldwell asks with a desperate pleading, "Oh, when is he going to die?" Starting at such a level of anger, it is difficult for the players to find much new emotional territory to cover, and they do not. Strindberg intended moments of dark laughter in The Dance of Death, but the audience laughs with a bewildered edginess, as if not quite sure that it should.

One imagines that a couple hatefully married for 25 years, rather than bludgeoning each other with such sullen insults, would have developed between them an immense repertory of malice, of silences and nuance. And surely, as in this play's descendant, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the couple would know precisely where to strike to draw blood. As it is, Alice simply calls Edward a "miserable old wart hog" and a "fiend," as if she had long since despaired of finding anything more imaginative to say. The Dance, at last, is little more than a gray and rather disagreeable marathon.

L.M.

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