'Dance of Death' fails to deliver final payoff
NEW YORK - Long considered a masterpiece, August Strindberg's 1900 "Dance of Death" plays now like the antecedent of many 20th-century dramas about corrosive marriages.
Think of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "The Lion in Winter," in which spouses slash away, knowing each other's vulnerability too well, but having also a safe zone to which they can retreat with bared hearts and souls intact.
Revived at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre in a new translation by Richard Greenberg, "Dance of Death" has just six characters, three of whom are almost nonexistent.
The central couple, Edgar (Ian McKellen) and Alice (Helen Mirren), are approaching their silver anniversary with swords drawn for continuous thrust and parry.
He's an army captain, apparently retired considering their impoverishment. She's a former actress who rues that she gave up the theater. All her friends are famous now.
But then, they have no friends.
Consigned to a small island off the coast of Sweden, where they live in the white-tiled tower of what used to be a prison (they call it their little hell), they've alienated everyone including a son they agree is "astoundingly ugly" and the daughter whose alliance they battled over until she abandoned them.
Scornful of every last neighbor on the island, they torment each other. He drinks, slips into catatonia occasionally and knows he is dying. She, 10 years his junior, awaits his passing like a jackal, even though the future without him holds no discernible promise.
He reaches out at least once ("I don't want to die"), but she spurns him. He moves sometimes just to outrun death, the way an exhausted automobile driver might stave off sleep.
Occasionally an ominous old woman (Anne Pitoniak) passes, like a harbinger of death, but the couple's only visitor is Alice's cousin Kurt (David Strathairn), the island's new quarantine officer. Edgar and Alice try to enlist him as an ally against each other as they had their daughter.
"There's something about this place - something toxic," Kurt says, intimidated in the manner of the younger guest Nick in "Virginia Woolf."
Nervously overstating the obvious, he adds: "My marriage was terrifying, but I think yours is even worse."
As directed by Sean Mathis, this "Dance of Death" benefits from Santo Loquasto's partly expressionistic, largely realistic set, which conveys the rot and the clutter of a quarter century's psychological imprisonment.
Eerie, too, is Dan Moses Schreier's original music and mordant sound design, punctuated by seagulls, breaking waves and a plaintive foghorn.
Mathis strives to make the resolutely downbeat play more accessible through bits of broadly playful staging - an approach supported by Alice's assertion that they're miserable but "with fun patches."
Despite prickly good playing by the craggy McKellen and Mirren, though, the characters' jaggedness comes across much more potently than their latent humanity and all the hurt that went into submerging it.
There's a point at which "Dance of Death" should move us, and for all its thrashing, this production doesn't deliver the final payoff.
Its reason for being is the armed minuet of McKellen and Mirren.
Strathairn, an asset to countless films, seems quite out of his league here. Beyond Kurt's natural befuddlement, Strathairn acts as if he were struggling with the very process of communication in a company of theater thoroughbreds.
From the outset he seems to be defeated by his conspicuously studied approach.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This show was part of the Tribune-Review's Fall Broadway theater trip.
