Aurora's 'The Creditors' Is A Perverse Play Trapped In A Professional Productiom

Here’s a question for you—why would any theater at any time produce anything other than a great play? Why isn’t excellence our lowest common denominator? I’ll grant you a caveat or two. As an art form evolves, we can miss the brilliance of the new. Understanding and judging contemporary work is difficult, much harder than scooping up diamonds from the past.

Or here’s another obvious objection—there are infinite paths to the great, few worthy maps, and many false paths. Okay, right and true, but since genius is by its nature unique and multiple, the treasures are, at the very least, everywhere. No matter your sense or inclination on these matters, greatness that is, there’s always something right in front of you: if you bother to care or look.

As I see actors, directors, designers, and audiences suffer under the violence of bad plays, I wonder how we allow our theaters to operate like this, production after production, season after season. So it’s interesting to reverse the equation. What happens when brilliance sneaks into a theater hell-bent against it, when in a rogue moment a theater committed to mediocrity chooses the great play rather than the thousands of bad ones?

The Aurora Theater in Berkeley is the King of dressing up junk in well-acted, well-designed productions. If steady competence alone were a virtue, the Aurora would ascend to the heavens to lounge with Shakespeare and Aristophanes. And yet somehow here they are producing The Creditors, August Strindberg’s nut fest of betrayal and revenge, tempting the Gods with the real thing.

And let’s just say the real thing destabilized the Aurora’s well-oiled machine and was a welcome surprise to the opening night crowd. As you might guess, it’s more fun to see a great play in an imperfect production, than a bad play in which the acting, direction, and design are without fault.

To merely recite Strindberg’s script is to enter a world of lunacy. After all, this is a man who accused one of his ex-wives of sending her astral spirit across town and raping him while he slept. And the characters in The Creditors aren’t that far from such unhinged nastiness, the kind of psychological assaults where demonic possession is an open question. If they can’t quite separate souls from bodies, they are expert at slipping into weaker minds and knifing every last dream and hope.

Adolph is married to Tekla whose ex-husband Gustav has secretly befriended his replacement. The geometry is simple and so are the blows—they’re all looking for an advantage in and out of marriage. Adolph feels weakened by Tekla and strengthened by his new friendship with Gustav, though unaware that Gustav is his rival and looking for vengeance. Tekla, alive to the thrill of crushing fragile boys in men’s bodies, has no need for secrecy—she destroys and then writes romans-à-clef.

In Strindberg, psychological annihilation is a sport and even the weakest enjoy the game. And it is his sense of play and games in the broadest sense that makes his works sparkle with a vibrancy that is unmatched among the great modern playwrights. Chekhov and Ibsen have greater scope, but Strindberg is the party. No matter the production, you’re going to get a kick out the host, though in this production the kick is limited by a corresponding lack of vision.

Strindberg’s plays demand an alertness of spirit and a go-for-broke aesthetics that the Aurora isn’t in the practice of giving. Tame and bad plays allow for professionalism, but not art, and certainly not the type of chaos The Creditors is after. Why drive a Ferrari if you aren’t going to risk crashing it. That’s the allure of speed and great art, taking it to the limit and losing control, or, you know, just coming short of it.

John Patrick O’Malley as Adolph has the right idea and his performance is unbalanced in all the best possible ways. He loses control fast and gets more and more reckless as the play progresses. He’s attuned to the radical shifts in the play as if they were wired into his body. He’s not so much acting as inhabiting Strindberg’s writing and that’s the right way to do it. Rhys Williams and Rebecca Dines give competent performances and that’s just the problem: no one goes to see a Strindberg play (or really any play) to witness a competent display of proper line readings and no flubbed lines.

They’re just acting the idea of something vague rather than living the frenzy of thinking.

Barbara Dameshak’s production rarely courts the mania of the situation, though she does manage one brief flourish that is expert and true. Towards the end, Gustav runs from Adolph’s room to hide from Tekla and spy on her. He’s told the hapless Adolph that he wants to help him by observing them alone. As soon as he’s shut the door behind him, the lights change, and what we thought was a solid wall turns out to be a translucent scrim.

The audience gasped in delight at suddenly seeing Gustav hunched at the keyhole, as he watches the drama that we already know that he’s watching. The image is superfluous and that’s what makes it perfect for The Creditors. It is as if we are all at the keyhole with him. And you can feel Strindberg’s manic idiocy spread from the stage and into the souls of every audience member alive to what’s before them.

That one moment is terrific and I won’t soon forget it, but the rest of the production is too much of not enough. It’s a nice staged reading with costumes and lights, which in the case of The Creditors is worth your time but not Strindberg’s. He’s asking for an engagement with the world that’s radical and never ending, and that’s a type of theater the Aurora rarely aspires to.

Professionalism won’t get you there, friends; that’s just the first, baby step.

’The Creditors’ runs through March 3rd at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley. For tickets and information click here.