Scenes From a Marriage
Opening Night: September 22, 2014
Closing: October 26, 2014
Theater: NY Theatre Workshop
In this highly theatrical production of Ingmar Bergman’s popular 1974 film Scenes from a Marriage, an ensemble of virtuosic actors invites audiences into an intimate space to experience collectively the human dynamics of a relationship through all the stages of a life—from youth, to middle age to maturity. Ivo van Hove’s interpretation illuminates the universal themes of love, identity and vulnerability that are at the heart of Bergman’s timeless film.
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September 22, 2014
“There should be five-year contracts. Or an agreement that remains valid for one year that you can also terminate,” opines Johan to his wife, Marianne. He’s talking about marriage. “You and I are the exception to the rule,” he hastens to add, preempting an inevitable fight. Ingmar Bergman’s original 1973 television miniseries, Scenes From a Marriage, astutely captured the moments of truth and deception that decorate a wedded life. Fans of that film will find a faithful adaptation in Emily Mann’s English translation, which is now making its U.S. debut at New York Theatre Workshop. But under the guidance of visionary Dutch director Ivo Van Hove, the piece reaches a distinctly ingenious fever pitch, illuminating the themes of the film in fresh and exciting ways.
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September 22, 2014
You can’t accuse the Belgian director Ivo van Hove of picking fights with weaklings. His productions of Hedda Gabler, The Little Foxes, and A Streetcar Named Desire, all at New York Theater Workshop, have sometimes sucker-punched those venerable plays but in the end did no harm. I realize that’s not a high bar to set, but I have not usually been a fan of van Hove’s garish intrusions, which too often literalized sexual and aggressive drives in ways that made nonsense of the repressive worlds from which they arose. So I thought I was in for more of the same when NYTW announced that it would be producing a version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage that van Hove had conceived and directed for his company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam. All anyone was talking about was the staging — and perhaps a part of the director’s motivation for erecting elaborate superstructures around his favorite texts is to draw attention to his own creativity. But what of Bergman’s? Scenes From a Marriage, shown in six episodes on Sweden television in 1973 and then released as a shorter theatrical film, is a major statement from a major artist on a major human dilemma. Was it to be reduced to an avant-garde plaything, a lazy Susan of stage gimcrackery?
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September 22, 2014
In terms of sheer inventiveness, Scenes From a Marriage may be the season’s most daring show. No wonder Ivo van Hove and Emily Mann’s eye-popping tour de force is building buzz. Working from Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 TV miniseries about the dissolution of a couple — an academic named Johan and a lawyer named Marianne — director Van Hove and adapter Mann use three different couples of varying ages to tell their story. This grand concept required New York Theatre Workshop to divide its main space into three smaller, distinct ones, with the audience divided accordingly.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 22, 2014
Like the union of Marianne and Johan that disintegrates from accord to acrimony to “sign the divorce papers,” the stage version of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 miniseries begins intriguingly but ends up being less than happily-ever-after. The TV version, famous for its close-up, we’ve-all-been-there banality, played out chronologically. But that’s not director Ivo van Hove’s approach. Working from Emily Mann’s adaptation, the Belgian van Hove casts the couple in triplicate — with Susannah Flood and Alex Hurt as the youngest Marianne and Johan; Roslyn Ruff and Dallas Roberts as the duo in middle age, and Tina Benko and Arliss Howard as the most mature Marianne and Johan. There’s no effort to cast actors who look alike. In the more interesting first half, the audience is split into three groups and seated in separate rooms — private except for a window that looks into a central area as a half-hour conversation goes on.
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September 22, 2014
This is the way we were, and the way we are, and the way we will be. And we are fools if we think we can separate any of these versions from the others. A profound emotional grammar operates in Scenes From a Marriage, Ivo van Hove’s inspired reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s landmark television mini-series from 1973. Past, present and future selves haunt one another relentlessly in this resonant dissection of a single, mutating relationship, which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop. As you listen to the first of many conversations between this play’s uneasily and inextricably linked central characters, Johan and Marianne, you’ll hear other voices — which are their voices, too — out of the corner of your ear. You start to realize that you’re caught in an echo chamber where everything that’s said is underscored by ghostly shouts and murmurs spoken in another time, another place, by these same people.
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