“The new wine has burst the old bottles,” the playwright August Strindberg wrote, in a bullish preface to his 1888 play “Miss Julie,” setting out a catalogue of revolutionary theatrical principles. Outdated conventions needed to be cleared away, Strindberg said. To make modern, naturalistic plays, there could be no more immense proscenium spaces, painted backdrops, or intermissions. The playwright needed intimacy to ensorcell his audience, and intervals between acts might allow theatregoers to escape the “suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist.” In this manifesto, and in his spate of character-driven masterpieces written in 1887 and 1888—“Miss Julie,” “The Father,” “Creditors”—Strindberg essentially invented the small-cast, ninety-minute psychosexual slugfest.
Earlier this year, the actor Hugh Jackman, the producer Sonia Friedman, and the director Ian Rickson returned to that hundred-and-forty-year-old experiment—the less-is-more, small-stage ethic—by forming TOGETHER, a company whose début offerings are being presented by Audible in its compact Minetta Lane Theatre, Off Broadway. The season consists of Hannah Moscovitch’s Strindbergesque “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” from 2020, and Strindberg’s “Creditors,” newly adapted by Jen Silverman. Rickson stages both plays with elegant restraint, arranging just a few bits of furniture in front of a bare brick wall. Despite the productions’ aesthetic modesty, these are starry projects: Jackman performs in “Sexual Misconduct” with Ella Beatty as his foil; in “Creditors,” Liev Schreiber faces off against Maggie Siff and Justice Smith. The plays appear in alternating repertory, arranged for their casts’ convenience. (Jackman, for instance, is simultaneously in residence at Radio City Music Hall.) It’s surely a coincidence that Jackman and Schreiber, both Tony winners, once played the comic-book nemeses Wolverine and Sabretooth, but their history does give the whole big-men-downtown enterprise a further sense of Strindbergian competition.
In Moscovitch’s “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” Jackman plays Jon, a college professor in the midst of a marital separation, who finds himself entranced by a student in a red coat, Annie (Beatty), who sits in the front row of his class. As Jon narrates his increasing obsession with her, Rickson has Jackman approach the audience, exerting his familiar self-deprecating charm. He asks with jovial concern if the people in the balcony can hear him, and, whenever Jon takes a wrong step, he assures us, speaking in the third person, of his reluctance to go further. After Annie shows up on his porch, Jon ushers the nineteen-year-old inside, and the audience sucks in its breath. Jackman holds up his hands in mock surrender: “Well, this, he recognized, was very bad.”
Jon frequently tells us how brilliant and capable Annie is, but in her breathy pauses she seems more like a person stunned into incomprehension. Jon primarily worries that he is treating Annie as a figure in a story—her red coat certainly suggests that he is a wolf. The very first anecdote he shares sets us to wondering if, despite his constant self-questioning, he might not be a good guy. “A few weeks ago, the janitor forgot to unlock the men’s toilet before office hours,” Jon says. “So he’d had to urinate into his thermos.” The symbolism isn’t subtle.
Considered minute by minute, this “Sexual Misconduct” is a strangely pleasant experience, one that dodges discomfort, to its eventual cost. Jackman and Beatty create little heat between them—he seems to be working harder to seduce the audience than to entice the girl—and Beatty, in a drifting and interior performance, enacts the script’s many ellipses by letting her mouth drop open, sometimes pursing it noiselessly, like a fish. Jackman, ever the movie star, never permits Jon so much as a hint of corruption, not even when Beatty takes control of the narration. Jon’s idea of himself (menschy, bewildered, kind) therefore overwhelms Annie’s picture of him as a sinkhole in her life.
Moscovitch, in an interview about her play for the CBC, drew parallels between the Jon-Annie relationship and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair—in both, questions abound about the limits of consensuality when a man sleeps with a young woman who has far less power. Moscovitch says she chose the word “misconduct” for the title to skewer the characterization of such encounters as sexual peccadilloes, rather than, as she believes, episodes of coercion or assault. The play is slippery on this point. Moscovitch uses the structure of Strindbergian psychodrama—woman versus man—to reveal a gap in language itself. In her construction, nothing Annie says, including her statements of desire, indicates whether she’s actually able to consent.
Strindberg’s mid-career outpouring of tragedies about couples in existential conflict emerged during a troubled, violent period in his life, when his marriage was falling apart. These often virulently anti-woman plays, which became his most famous and influential, revealed his deranged sense of marital grievance. (To give a sense of how well adjusted he was, in 1887 he wrote a friend about having his sexual equipment measured by a doctor at a brothel, after which he haughtily informed his wife, “The screw is not necessarily too small because the nut is too big.”) An obsession with dominance carried over into his work. Strindberg used—and popularized—a zero-sum, prosecutorial, winner-take-all approach to relationships as his dramatic engine. More than a century later, you often see that same mechanism at work, in feminist psychodramas, too. Moscovitch’s play asks us to reason backward from all the damage done, and it arrives at an awful place, one reminiscent of Strindberg’s own hell, where a woman’s word can’t be trusted, even by the woman herself.
In the more vividly acted “Creditors,” Jen Silverman at first seems to maintain Strindberg’s dramatic pattern. At an isolated hotel, a charismatic older man, Gustav (Schreiber), talks to a young artist, Adi (Smith), luring him toward greater and deeper confidences. Adi (called Adolf in the original) has a wife, Tekla (Siff), who has written a book about her first marriage. As Gustav probes Adi about his sex life, we realize that Gustav is in fact Tekla’s first husband. This is hardly a spoiler; Gustav’s lies wouldn’t trick a kitten.
But Adi, played by Smith with cashmere softness, doesn’t figure it out. Instead, he gives way to the older man’s influence, taking his advice to mistrust and abuse his wife, as Gustav eavesdrops next door. Where Silverman radically departs from Strindberg’s bitter play is in their portrait of Tekla, who is a spikily delightful self-starter instead of the idiot-monster of the original. Siff—who was one of the finest Beatrices I’ve ever seen in “Much Ado About Nothing,” in 2013—strikes sparks off both her stage husbands, until the small theatre almost glows.
The play really belongs to Schreiber, though. One of his great gifts as an actor is the way he manipulates our impression of his height and his looming, linebacker bulk. Sometimes he uses his size for comedy: Gustav spends a lot of his time hunched in a too-small leather club chair, rolling cigarettes—very tiny cigarettes, Dr. Freud—and peering at his targets through the smoke. His voice rumbles hypnotically with eerie subharmonics, and it’s only when he gets up and comes close to either Adi or Tekla that we see how massive the guy is, either to drag along as baggage or to climb like a wall.
Strindberg’s title refers to the debt he believes Tekla owes Gustav, the man who “shaped” her, but Silverman—whose plays include last year’s unlikely Broadway romance “The Roommate”—reveals all such debts to be misogynist rubbish. Adi hurts Tekla, and Gustav might be a sociopath. But Silverman’s version moves beyond Strindberg’s toxic blame game to explore the erotic vulnerability of each member of the ménage, as well as the animal forces that draw them together in new configurations. Is that a more honest portrayal of sexual dynamics than Jon and Annie’s? It’s certainly a more involving one. Strindberg would not have enjoyed Silverman’s scuppering of the hetero-masculine prerogative, but he might have responded to the ecstatic surrender of it. When Strindberg invented this form, he didn’t just expect us to drink the new wine—he wanted us to get drunk. ♦
