Peer group?

David Henry Hwang takes on Ibsen's epic

by Jeffrey Gantz

So why hadn't David Henry Hwang, Tony-winning author of M. Butterfly and current Trinity Repertory Company artist-in-residence, ever done an adaptation? "No one ever asked me," he explains over the phone from New York. But they have now: at the urging of Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis, Hwang got together with Swiss director Stephan Muller to work on a production of Henrik Ibsen's long 1867 dramatic poem Peer Gynt. The result, clocking in at about two hours and 15 minutes (about half the length of the original), opens at Trinity tomorrow night, January 30.

"The concerns of the play wander through so many different areas," Hwang points out. "It's a folk tale, it's a commentary on the social situation of Ibsen's time, it's an attack on certain political figures of his day, it works on sort of a Jungian level, it's all over the map. That was one of the reasons I thought it would be fun. And in fact I've had a really good time working on it. I'd like to do another one."

Ibsen's first staging notion was to replace the long fourth act, which rambles and is full of topical references, with a "musical tone-picture." What was Hwang's approach? "I actually started working on it with the bones of the structure in place -- Stephan had already come up with the idea of folding the fourth act as a series of flashbacks into the fifth act. I just approached it as I would any play. Once it got on its feet, I tried to tear away things that seemed extraneous -- I tried to be as ruthless with it as one would be with one's own work."

Both the trolls and the mysterious Boyg came up for discussion. "Stephan talks about trolls in the European conception as being almost the way we look at werewolves or vampires. Whereas we all grew up with cute trolls with purple hair." The Trinity creatures will be called trolls, but "they have the flavor of being a kind of survivalist cult. It feels a little bit like Waco." As for the Bøyg, the invisible troll-like creature that tells Peter to "Go around," it's now the Invisible Hand. "There are interpretations where the Boyg is the superego; there are interpretations where the Bøyg is the id. As I see it, Peer is at a point where he's met Solveig and fallen in love, and the Boyg tells him to go the long way around, which is what he eventually does in terms of running away from Solveig. The Boyg functions as a supertroll; it's a malevolent thing -- like the trolls it causes him to go away from Solveig. So the idea of an Invisible Hand was interesting because it suggests Adam Smith and so has the implication of being there for yourself."

Then there's the Thin Person in act five, who appears to be the Devil -- at Trinity he's the young Peer. "Stephan always had this notion of using more than one Peer. We also thought there needed to be some kind of climactic conflict for Peer to go through. And the idea of the young Peer meeting the old Peer, since we had two separate actors doing it anyway, seemed to be an interesting way to go, not from Ibsen, but in a Freudian sense a fascinating way to wrap up the whole interchange between how one person becomes another. To have a person be in conflict with himself would be a theatrical way to present one of the essential conflicts in the play." And the Button Molder, who threatens to melt Peer down? "He's now the two Coin Inspectors -- I took the other metaphor, the worn-down coin, and made that the central metaphor because it seemed to me to be easier to understand."

What about the original's religious sensibility -- Solveig and her prayer book, and her faith in Peer? "A lot of the things that were religious have become more psychoanalytical. To confront oneself -- to go back to the two Peers -- is sort of like confronting death, but it has more of a psychoanalytic overtone than a religious one."

Hwang is, of course, aware that Ibsen is said to have been Freud's favorite playwright. "I think that a lot of my personal biases are Freudian, and therefore they work themselves into this adaptation. But a Freudian interpretation suggests that Peer has a definitive identity, that there is an essential Peer that he does not succeed in finding throughout the play but that one existed if only he could find it. Whereas sometimes I believe in the deconstructionist approach to Peer's identity -- which is that there is no essential identity, and that his identity is a function of the particular context he's in. And that interpretation would seem to be reinforced by the onion monologue in act five [Peer peels an onion and finds no center, only layers]. You can play it either way."

Trinity Repertory Company's production of Peer Gynt opens Friday, January 30, and runs through March 8. Call (401) 351-4242.