THE NIGHT OF THE TRIBADES
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Take his first marriage, for instance, the background against which The Night of the Tribades, currently being staged by Center Theater, is set: as long as Siri von Essen was married to somebody else, Strindberg adored her. In a letter he called it “a love which is not sensual and that is not consummated and does not wish to be consummated . . . showing me that angels exist, even among human beings . . .” When their relationship became openly adulterous, he kept his platonic ideals; but once they were married, when he discovered all the human imperfections inevitable to intimate contact, his conflicting feelings toward women came out. Woman was both loving mother and wanton vampire, which led him to see himself as the innocent victim “ruined by a married whore,” to suspect that their child was fathered by Siri’s ex-husband, to accuse her of conspiring with a “league of women” to have him committed to an insane asylum. He also accused her of drunkenness, infidelity, uncleanliness, neglect, domination–and lesbianism.
Per Olov Enquist, the author of The Night of the Tribades, finds it dramatically convenient to assume that Siri did indeed have an affair with one Marie Caroline David. Thus, when the play opens, at a rehearsal of Strindberg’s new play The Stronger (a two-woman piece intended as a vehicle for Siri’s return to the stage after the failure of her marriage to August), she and Marie immediately begin to make eyes at each other. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband as immediately begins to vilify them as individuals, as a couple, and as a sex, aligning himself with an embarrassed male actor. (The purpose of this character, Viggio Schiwe, is never completely clear–The Stronger has no male role–but he does act as a naive foil for the others.) In fact, most of the first act is taken up with August’s vilification of the women, delivered in the sort of sustained tantrum we associate with British comedian John Cleese. Occasionally he pauses to pose in sulky grandeur, while the other characters, instead of walking out, smile and take it. (The frightened Schiwe asks what seems to me a very reasonable question: “Is it necessary to talk of these things?”)
Night of the Tribades, with its operatic proportions, appears to have been written for a much larger playing space than Center’s intimate little theater can provide. Sheryl Nieman, Kathy Scambiatterra, and R.J. Coleman, speaking in flawless Masterpiece Theatre accents, and Dan LaMorte, speaking in a strange melodramatic whine like Robert De Niro doing Elmer Fudd, are all excellent actors who carry out their tasks admirably; but they seem painfully restricted by an acting area that doesn’t allow more than a few steps in any direction and in which an actor standing downstage blocks the audience’s view of anything happening behind him. Director Randi Collins-Hard does what she can to fit this ten-gallon play into a five-pint container, but she succeeds only part of the time. The audience wishes as claustrophobically for more distance from the action as the actors must wish for distance from each other.
