Rosmersholm
Politics in this country have become inseparable from political theater. Decades-ago drug experimentation, offhand allusions to witchcraft, and dalliances with young up-and-comers on the campaign trail and in office are doggedly sought out, exhaustively distributed, and used by the opposition to cast aspersions onto a public figure’s entire character and ability to lead. What’s worse, we didn’t even come up with it ourselves — it’s all right there in master dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, written in 1886 in response to the divisive political climate in his home country of Norway. Now in a rare production by Magenta Giraffe Theatre at Detroit’s 1515 Broadway, with direction by Frannie Shepherd-Bates, the story of a man conscripted into the public arena at his own peril proves as hyperbolically dire as it is disarmingly prescient.
Jon Ager is Johannes Rosmer, a well-respected clergyman who has removed himself from the public eye after his mentally unstable wife drowned herself within view of the front parlor window. His sense of home and order comes in the form of Rebecca West (Alysia Kolascz), who came to live at the house called Rosmersholm as his late wife’s caretaker and stayed thereafter to provide him counsel and companionship. At the time, an unmarried woman sharing a house with a widower would ruffle serious feathers, but the pairing is shown to be utterly innocuous and, more importantly, nobody else’s business — that is, until Rosmer is recruited by his brother-in-law (Keith Allan Kalinowski) to join their conservative friends in an unofficial movement to curtail the free-thinking liberalism that’s gaining in popularity. When Rosmer must admit that he has embraced the liberal point of view (and abandoned his Christian faith in the offing), a battle for leverage suddenly changes relationships to alliances and oppositions, and the first stirrings of a rotten truth threaten to gurgle to the surface.
As the officious, prominent citizen activist Professor Kroll, Kalinowski presents a sour man whose comfort with being in control leads him to assume that everyone around him thinks like him — to wit, he offers his opinion as fact, entirely unaware of and unbothered by his impudence. Yet his intimations that the conservatives have dirt on Rosmer and aren’t afraid to use it are met with equally slippery spin in his opposition, Peter Mortensgaard (Richard Payton). In a single scene, Payton’s populist newspaper mogul takes ownership of Rosmer’s story and trims it to suit his needs, explaining away major omissions with a crisp odiousness that leaves the viewer uncertain whether he’s keeping a friend close or an enemy closer. The political machinations in the play’s first half are intriguing, but these are neck and neck with the awful personal ramifications of public declaration and attendant public scrutiny.
As the heat is turned up on Rosmer’s home life, the stakes continue an improbable vertical climb. Ager navigates the changing world of a deliberate, small-living, generous man with purpose and quiet resolve; however, unable to follow his keen instinct to stay out of it, he grasps at the remains of his unassuming former life with increasing desperation. As his primary confidante and witness to the proceedings, Kolascz gives her Rebecca aloof poise and a bold readiness to reveal the power Rosmer has entrusted to her — when this woman shrinks from speaking her mind, red flags wave furiously. The cast is rounded out by Dave Davies as Rosmer’s former tutor and something of an academic free spirit, and Dominique Lowell as a loyal — or is it shiftily complicit? — housekeeper. In keeping with Ibsen’s artfully didactic style, the production has a soaring melodramatic undercurrent, building to a far-fetched conclusion that the performers give it their all to earn.
Although the parallels are uncanny, contextual and social mores prevent Rosmersholm from feeling actually contemporary. The loosening of buttoned-up times is crucial to the high stakes of this melodrama, and costumer Barbie Amann Weisserman’s expressive wardrobe against the formal austerity given the titular abode by set designer Katie Orwig and lighting designer Neil Koivu reinforce the struggle of an old age being thrown over. However, the distance is welcome as a point of comparison; seeing a household torn apart, for reasons likely remote from the viewer’s own life, allows for unforced and clear reflection of the still-relevant personal cost of political conflict.
September 23, 2011