Norwegian tinder

Trinity's reduced but rollicking Peer Gynt

by Carolyn Clay

PEER GYNT. By Henrik Ibsen. Conceived by David Henry Hwang and Stephan Muller. Adapted by Hwang. Directed by Muller. Set design by Eugene Lee. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Roger Morgan. Choreography by Paula Hunter. Music composed by Kevin Fallon. With Timothy Crowe, Fred Sullivan Jr., Cynthia Strickland, Bob Grady, Mauro Hantman, Robert J. Colonna, Barbara Orson, Melinda Pinto, Rebecca Poole, Brian McEleney, Liesl Tommy, and Kevin Fallon. At Trinity Repertory Company, through March 1.

In a filthy Egyptian madhouse deep in the wilds of Ibsen's fourth act, Peer Gynt is crowned "the Emperor of Self." But at Trinity Repertory Company, Peer Gynt is a shadow of its Self. In this daring new adaptation by Tony-winning dramatist David Henry Hwang and Swiss director Stephan Muller, Ibsen's unwieldy if thrilling five-hour fantasia of folklore, parable, philosophy, and dream becomes a two-and-a-quarter-hour ride on a winged horse with thundering hoofs and a winking eye. The adaptation is clever if sometimes flip and necessarily reductive. And Muller's athletic, stripped-down staging is very theatrical. But the play becomes less an epic circular journey ("Go roundabout," the great B[[questiondown]]yg directs in Ibsen's version) than a bang-up adventure that bleeds into a Freudian allegory.

Ibsen's 1867 dramatic poem is virtually unstageable as written, and it's common to pare it down. (Ibsen himself suggested cutting the entire fourth act.) At Hartford Stage, in the early '90s, Richard Thomas starred in a fine production that used a then-new verse translation by Gary Bamman and Irene Berman. By contrast, Hwang & Muller's adaptation does not aspire to poetry; it's rambunctious, filled with Americanisms and anachronisms. Some of the play's mystery figures are contemporized, with the B[[questiondown]]yg becoming a lounge-lizard crooner who advises Peer to take "the easy way out." Most effective is the Strange Passenger of Peer's journey home, in the silky person of Brian McEleney a smiling Noel-Coward-as-cancer, dressing-gowned and gliding on one roller blade.

It's significant that this Peer Gynt utilizes two actors to play Ibsen's title character, so that after a life of self-delusion and far-flung accomplishment the regret-ridden Peer can meet, along with various allegorical incarnations of the Reaper, his own Self and try to turn events around. This makes for a more modern and psychological take on Ibsen's larger-than-life Norwegian ne'er-do-well. But by folding the play's world-wandering fourth act into its fifth (in which Peer at last travels home), the adapters eliminate the possibility that Peer Gynt has died in the climactic scene in the madhouse and that what follows is, in essence, a deathbed experience.

For those who are not Ibsen scholars: the first half of the play has Peer, the braggart antihero of a small Norwegian village, making the bed in which he then fails to lie. Heir to a tradition of storytelling and drink, he spends his time dreaming of death-defying reindeer rides and future greatness. At a village wedding he meets Solveig, the woman whose pure faith and love will inspire him -- but he runs off with the bride. An outlaw, he then flirts with trolls, unconsciously adopting their motto of "All I can be, I already am" and fathering a mutant child that will haunt him like original sin. Upon the death of his mother, Ase, Peer abandons Solveig and takes off to make his fortune, traveling the world in pursuit of wealth and desire until he discovers, too late, that in seeking self-realization he has lost it. In the play's most famous scene, Peer peels an onion, looking for its core but finding nothing. "Just a hint of the old Gyntish flavor" is all that remains of himself.

Muller and Providence-to-Broadway set designer Eugene Lee have conspired to create a physical production in the best Trinity tradition: spare, roughhewn, ingenious, and rowdy. Bright lights glare and, in a scene depicting a shipwreck, wildly swing. A wooden walkway, raised and lowered by ropes and pulleys, traverses the stage, with ladders at both ends. This allows Fred Sullivan Jr.'s energetic young Peer to skittle up and down like a mountain goat; later the walkway, equipped with a large wheel, serves as the bridge of the ship carrying Timothy Crowe's embittered old Peer home (his fourth-act adventures as a slave trader, false prophet, and asylum crasher are touched on in flashback). I don't know why the production is so loud. Clearly it was a choice to have Peer, his fiercely adoring mother, and all the taunting villagers shout. The folklorish wedding scene is like some thundering Norwegian version of Riverdance.

After intermission, the decibels decrease, though we lose Cynthia Strickland's glintingly unsentimental rendering of Ase; Strickland, too long absent from Trinity's stage, teams with a pained if too-perky Sullivan to make Ase's deathbed scene (played on a little wooden wagon) at once Beckettesque and sweet. The corrosive Crowe provides an effective counterpart to Sullivan's blond and buoyant young Peer. And he makes the most of the onion monologue, pulling the unaccountably produced vegetable apart with his hands.

Hwang and Muller take us on a hurtling, entertaining ride through the life of Peer Gynt. But there are bumps along with way, and the final destination is too unequivocally redemptive, both Peers coming to rest at Solveig's knee as she -- an insufficiently radiant Melinda Pinto -- serenades them comfortingly. (More effective is the dissonant fiddle music by Kevin Fallon.) In this too-brief adaptation, the trolls, though vulgar, are more weird than repulsive; the important madhouse scene barely registers; and Peer's adventure as a prophet duped by a foxy harem girl is amusingly but jarringly camped. (Asked by the wily Anitra what he wants, Sullivan's Peer replies, "To play escaped-convict and the warden's wife.") This is fun, but what's missing is the mythic and spiritual soul of Peer Gynt. It has become the core of the onion.