While this is going on, Johan 1 walks into a glassed-in “offstage” room, where various props are stored-phonographs, records, plants, and so on. As Marianne looks on with a kind of fascinated horror-Flood’s large eyes, like Ullmann’s, reveal how Marianne does and doesn’t identify with her own life-Katrina explains to the assembled that she hates Peter and his power games but loves how good their fucking gets when she’s cheating on him. On it, Johan 1 (Alex Hurt, a bright new star) and Marianne 1 (the versatile Susannah Flood) have placed plates and glasses they’re entertaining Katrina and Peter (Carmen Zilles and Erin Gann, both well cast), who have had too much to drink, and now Katrina is breathing fire. The main prop is a table, covered with a dull industrial-carpet-like fabric. First, he has dispensed with the proscenium arch the audience enters a small viewing area through a narrow passageway. Van Hove, working with his longtime production designer and domestic partner, Jan Versweyveld, has literally remade New York Theatre Workshop. Yet it feels peculiar or wrong to describe van Hove’s production in a linear way, because he powerfully messes with time, not only as it applies to Marianne and Johan but as it applies to storytelling in the theatre. We see Marianne and Johan united, then not after meeting to sign their divorce papers, they cheat on their new partners together, before finding some level of acceptance of themselves and of each other. Van Hove, a Belgian director who has become a much admired and much reviled figure in the New York theatre world-his 1999 interpretation of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for instance, featured a Blanche who played almost all her scenes in a tub-more or less follows Bergman’s narrative arc. Johan wants to be “honest” with Marianne-they’ve shared everything, including, ironically, their family values-but how can you determine the truth of a relationship, when one partner has been deceitful, in order to protect himself and his dream of a free and different love?īergman, in an introduction to the published version of his script, describes Marianne and Johan as being “smug in a quiet way, convinced that they have arranged everything for the best.” In Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the work, with a script by Emily Mann (at New York Theatre Workshop), that smugness is disassembled and reassembled, just as the notions of intimacy and unfaithfulness are disassembled and reassembled. Bespectacled, chewing on a sandwich, Marianne listens, rapt, as if she were watching a movie about the unravelling of someone else’s life. When Johan tells Marianne that he has fallen in love with someone else, our focus is less on what he’s saying than on his wife’s face as she registers it. In Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 film “Scenes from a Marriage,” we never actually see the protagonist, Johan (Erland Josephson), having the affair that derails his marriage to Marianne (Liv Ullmann). For the self-dramatizing adulterer, life would be nothing without the pain of these contradictions. This cloak-and-dagger approach to love-to life-works only if you believe in marriage but hate it, too. Having an affair is certainly one way of shaking off the traditional constraints of matrimony, at least for a time, but, then again, what’s more conventional than an affair? Illicit love can get old fast, marred by the kinds of responsibilities one longs to escape: someone has to book that hotel room and hunt for those out-of-the-way restaurants where family and friends do not go. p.Alex Hurt and Susannah Flood as one of the couples in “Scenes from a Marriage.” Photograph by Christaan Felber The New England Historical and Genealogical Register,: Volume 46, Oct 1892. (1) 18 Aug., 1748, James Hatch, son of Benj. Susanna Flood, widow of John Flood, daughter of Thomas and Mildred Inglesby. PROBLEMS/QUESTIONSProfile manager: Roger Hatch private message Mother of Susanna (Pemberton) Tufts and Mary (Pemberton) Hatchĭied about 1750 at about age 59
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