Bennett Fisher:
Rob and Paul, you both joked as we started this workshop that perhaps a better translation of Burned House would be Burned Plot. In Swedish, the title is actually Burned Plot as in a plot of land, but the title still fits if we think about plot in the literary sense. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Paul Walsh:
I think that in terms of the trajectory of modernist drama, this play – more than any other of the five Chamber Plays – experiments with, or thumbs its nose at, the notion of dramatic action, because there is no compelling dramatic action to this play. It’s a wandering, meandering series of conversations that circle back on each other, constantly amplifying different themes, but that doesn’t really move with the directness that we expect a drama to move. So it dissolves its own plot or burns its plot like we burn our bridges in life.

Bennett Fisher:
Since it’s working against so many of the dramatic conventions in terms of how we expect a play should move, what sort of challenges or exciting opportunities does that give you as a director?

Rob Melrose:
I just adore this play. I love it in the same way I love the plays of Beckett where there are strangers on stage, talking and finding things out about each other and moving on. Nothing happens and everything is happening. Its structure is not exactly like those Beckett plays, but the tone seems very similar at times. It has a wicked sense of mean, nasty humor in the same way that Beckett’s plays do. There’s kind of a Peer Gynt thing going on too. Peer goes from land to land in that play and meets different people; in this play, the Stranger stays put and different strange people from his past blunder through the scene and interact with him. The play also makes me think of a Clint Eastwood movie called High Plains Drifter. In that film, a man is killed by the townspeople, ostensibly by the corruption of the town. He then comes back and exposes the corruption of every person in the town. He’s kind of like a ghost haunting them. In this play, similarly, we don’t know whether the stranger is alive or dead. He seems to be alive – he’s walking around, after all – but he mentions that he hanged himself in a closet when he was 12 and talks about being in the morgue. At various times in the play, he wonders whether he is alive or dead. He comes across people from his town, people from his childhood who he hasn’t seen in decades and exposes their life, exposes their hypocrisy and destroys their illusions. At the end of every scene, the person who he’s talking to is a lot worse off than when they started. It’s a lot of fun.

Paul Walsh:
And at the same time, the Stranger is neither saint nor hero. He’s not the sort of traditional vagabond, mystical monk who shows the world the path of redemption. On the contrary, he’s searching for that himself and is not even sure it exists. I think that’s an interesting introduction of the anti-heroes that will take the stage in the 1950s and the 1960s, who are themselves more flawed than the environment and as a result, able to expose something in themselves at the same time as they expose something in the world around them. It’s a very curious play! As I say, as a drama, it doesn’t have a dramatic drive, nor does it have a heroic character or a dramatic hero. But it does have a very surprising interaction between a flawed past and an equally flawed present, leading to the possibility of hope. To paraphrase the Stranger, through suffering, we learn patience and through patience, we learn hope. That’s a theme that will come up again and again in the five Chamber Plays, and it’s articulated here very clearly and very mystically. James Carpenter talks about this as being the most like the classic episodes of the TV show “The Twilight Zone,” and it has that strangeness to it for sure.

Rob Melrose:
Another play it reminds me a little of is Ionesco’s Victims of Duty. Victims of Duty begins with a detective coming in and you think “oh, it’s going to be a detective story, we’re going to find out the mystery.” And of course, Ionesco has completely different ideas about what we’re going to do and the detective is almost there to make fun of the audience. Watching that play, your primary interest isn’t following the detective and solving the mystery. A similar thing happens here. A house is burned down, we don’t know who burned the house down. A detective is searching for the culprit, sure, but the primary interest is following the Stranger around and enjoying his encounters with the people he comes across.

Bennett Fisher:
All of us, I think, were surprised working through it around the table about how often we were laughing in a genuine way, not in an ironic way. I think the humor in the piece goes against the popular conception that we have of Strindberg as sort of a dour, maudlin individual – even if that conception is not really informed by the text of his plays themselves. How does the humor work in this play and how are you finding that humor without trivializing the more dramatic aspects or poking fun at Strindberg in an ironic way.

Rob Melrose:
I taught a course on Virginia Woolf, and she is another author unjustly accused of humorlessness. I read her early book, Flush, which is a fantastic autobiography of the cocker spaniel owned by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s delightfully funny and it shows what an amazing sense of humor Virginia Woolf had . When I read later books like Mrs. Dalloway or Orlando or To the Lighthouse, which I thought didn’t have any humor, I’d been tuned into the frequency of her humor, and I found it cropping up more and more. With Strindberg, I’ve been reading his novel The Red Room. In the book, he criticizes Stockholm society, criticizes the way art is bought and sold, the way insurance is set up, and it’s done in a way that almost feels like a Vonnegut novel. It’s so satirical and ironic and delightful. Reading it, I am finding ways to make these plays authentically funny. And, as I said before, the humor is a little like Beckett in that it’s really dark and there are crazy coincidences, but Strindberg very much has control over what he’s doing. I feel like Jim [James Carpenter] has really figured out how to embrace the humor by finding the intentional absurdity that Strindberg creates.

Bennett Fisher:
This play has the largest cast of any of the Chamber Plays. I’m wondering how that changes the definition of intimacy in these plays. What sort of challenges does that present for a director when there are so many characters, so many threads, so many tangled stories that the audience has to keep in their heads?

Paul Walsh:
One thing is that it reminds us that intimacy is not about small. It’s about a quality of self-revelation. The Stranger’s encounter with himself, by way of each of these other people, allows for a particular kind of revelation and self-examination. We tend to think of intimate theater, chamber theater, as being two or three characters or two or three actors interacting with each other in order to reveal something about themselves. Here, Strindberg is using a larger canvas, taking a large number of people in order to reveal nuances of self that would not be possible with just a few.

Rob Melrose:
In some ways, I think this play is easier than a play like The Ghost Sonata. Even though it has slightly more people than The Ghost Sonata, there’s a dual between two brothers at the center. There is a scene between the Dyer and the Stranger that is the longest sustained two-person scene in any of the Chamber Plays. That scene is really like a downward spiral. The two characters just keep going, they keep drilling down further and further into their past and uncovering crimes, little nicks that they’ve given each other, and the revenges that they want to take on each other. Having that scene at the center gives the play a strong core. Outside of that, it’s the Stranger kind of bumping up against people from the town. It’s almost like the town is the other character and he goes, for the most part, through the town one by one.

Bennett Fisher:
In many of the Chamber Plays, we’ve talked about this idea of testing powers and stripping away of the mask. As you both have said in the rehearsal room, these are plays about settling accounts and closing things off. One line that really resonates in Burned House is something that the Mason says: “what you hide in the snow comes out with the thaw.” That really seems to be central to the story. As the house burns down, things are found in the ashes that reveal clues, but maybe on a more metaphorical level, there are things that are coming out in this thaw as the Stranger returns to his childhood home.

Rob Melrose:
I totally agree. Warren Buffett said, “you don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” As you say, the house burning down and it reveals actual, literal facts. We get proof that the family was smugglers because we see that the walls are double walls so that things could be hidden. We find the stolen copy of Christopher Columbus or the Discovery of America, which was an early theft between the two brothers. And from these objects, stories start to come to light. The more the Stranger talks to different people, the more we can really sift through the ashes and find what’s there.