Bennett Fisher:
The Black Glove is sometimes not included in the Chamber Plays…

Rob Melrose:
Not included by people who are wrong!

[laughter]

Bennett Fisher:
Strindberg wrote the first four plays in pretty short order for the Intimate Theater. They were all performed there, and then there was a two-year period between The Black Glove and those other plays, in which time Strindberg had a falling out with August Falk, the artistic director of the Intimate Theater. So The Black Glove was never produced at the Intimate Theater. Since the play was removed a little bit from the other Chamber Plays and closer to Strindberg’s final play, The Great Highway, what’s different about The Black Glove? What makes it a Chamber Play?

Paul Walsh:
What makes it a Chamber Play is that Strindberg called it a Chamber Play.

[laughter]

Bennett Fisher:
Well, there you go.

Paul Walsh:
Still. That’s a good question. None of these plays fit very comfortably in a chamber, and this play has too many characters and too many locations to be what we might consider a Chamber Play. But, like the other Chamber Plays, it really is a meditation on intimacy, and I think that thematically it ties in with the other Chamber Plays because it looks at the close proximity of actor to audience as a way of revealing inner thoughts with an honesty and a directness that I think Strindberg was associating with his notion of intimacy. It’s a play about intimacy and it’s intimate in its performance style. It’s totally different from the other Chamber Plays in that it’s lyrical. Its humor is not as sardonic. It’s fresher and lighter in tone. [It experiments with silent film acting, with a few scenes written totally in mimed actions without speaking. Rob has expanded that experiment by staging simultaneous actions that are happening elsewhere in the house and suggested in the play but not scripted. ]It’s very lyrical, this play, which sometimes makes it feel as though it is written by somebody other than Strindberg.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, you’ve talked a lot about connection to The Great Highway, which is a play that you’ve directed and know very well. Tell us about the connection you see there coming from The Great Highway into this play.

Rob Melrose:
Absolutely. And I should say the other reason why we feel it’s a Chamber Play is he called it a Chamber Play, as Paul said, and he also called it “Opus 5.” He numbered them, and he said The Black Glove is Opus 5, and he didn’t say The Great Highway is Opus 6. So for me, that’s why I say The Great Highway isn’t a Chamber Play. Although, what’s crazy is that in the book of Strindberg’s Open Letters to the Intimate Theater, the introduction has a list of all the plays that were performed at the Intimate Theater, and The Great Highway was performed at the Intimate Theater, and The Black Glove was not. The Great Highway, like The Black Glove, is in verse. It’s also very meditative, like The Black Glove. In The Black Glove there really is no main character – there are many interesting characters. In The Great Highway, there is one main character who feels very Strindberg-ian, but both the hunter in The Great Highway, and the old man in The Black Glove, are people at the end of their lives, looking back, trying to make sense of it, dealing with memory, dealing with jealousy, dealing with decisions they made that they either are or are not happy with. The Black Glove is a Christmas play on some level, so it’s lighter.

Bennett Fisher:
I think it’s probably the first Christmas play Cutting Ball’s done!

Rob Melrose:
I think you’re right! It’s a play of redemption. It gives you a happy ending, which I think is kind of fun. For a Strindberg play to have a happy ending. It’s a little like Euripides’ Helen, which is a Greek tragedy with a happy ending. You’re going to a Greek tragedy, you have a set of expectations, and then as the play progresses you realize it’s more like a romance. We know from Open Letters to the Intimate Theater that Strindberg was reading a lot of Shakespeare at the time, and he was also a huge fan of Goethe’s Faust. There’s a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Faust in this play. There are also two fairy-like characters, a Christmas angel and a Yule Tomte.

Bennett Fisher:
For our readers, a Tomte is a kind of gnome-like spirit that watches over the house, doing mischievous or helpful things, later becomes associated with Christmas.

Rob Melrose:
You know, the scene between the angel and the Yule Tomte is the very much like the first scene that Puck has in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Paul Walsh:
You know when Strindberg fell in love with Harriet Bosse, she was performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing Puck.

Rob Melrose:
Right! There’s this very Shakespearean kind of Puck-ishness about these two metaphysical characters. And then the old man in the attic, who’s the conservator, is studying the universe, studying animals, and kind of studying the nature of life. It feels very much like the beginning of either Goethe’s Faust or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus where Faust is alone, surrounded by papers, trying to figure out life. It’s a very rich, very dense play. So many influences are at work here.

Paul Walsh:
In many ways The Black Glove is a coda to the other four Chamber Plays. It doesn’t directly pick up all the themes that have been introduced in the other plays, but it resolves them, and it resolves them in a very lyrical and delightful way. It gives you an experience that’s totally different from the experience of the other four Chamber Plays, but concludes them. I think the struggle for life’s meaning and the recognition of the importance of personal memory and family that’s reinforced in this play provides a release from the long journey of the five Chamber Plays all together.

Bennett Fisher:
It’s interestingly coincidental that two of the artists working on this production, you, Paul, and James Carpenter, are also deeply associated with the A.C.T.’s long running production of A Christmas Carol. Paul, in an early rehearsal, you mentioned the link between Dickens and Strindberg, and the elements of this play that are like A Christmas Carol. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Paul Walsh:
You know, to a large extent, our notion of Christmas was shaped by Dickens. In the middle of the 19th century when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he went back to old traditions from the 18th century and revived them, giving us a sense of our modern nostalgic Christmas. One of Strindberg’s favorite authors was Dickens, and not just because of the peculiarity of his characters, but also because of the liveliness and tone shifts. Strindberg, in The Black Glove, also goes back and revives some of the country traditions surrounding the Swedish Christmas with the same kind of nostalgia and the same kind of Christian consciousness that Dickens brought to the notion of the Victorian Christmas. It’s not a play that I knew prior to working on the translation, nor a play that has received much scholarly attention. And yet, it is clearly both Strindberg-ian and strange.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, you touched very briefly on the way you’re planning to stage this play. To give the readers an idea, it’s inspired a bit by Roman arcade staging where you see a sort of triptych of several different scenes, each in a contained part of the stage. With this staging, we’re going to see each floor, each sort of apartment in this house simultaneously and then certain apartments will be lit and brought to the foreground, and certain apartments will fade to the background, but the action is always happening in each of those apartments all the way through. I’m curious to hear how you arrived at that idea for staging and also how it maybe changes the performance experience from what Strindberg may have originally imagined.

Rob Melrose:
It’s hard to know what Strindberg wanted [because I don’t know if it was performed during his lifetime]. It seems to be a play that wants each scene to be its own scene. At the same time, it’s almost like he wrote it for a film because in the first scene, you’re in a vestibule, but it seems like in that vestibule you’re able to see through a window and see into the entryway of the young wife’s apartment on the third floor. I always felt like it seems important to Strindberg to be able to look into one scene when you’re in another – not the attic and not the basement. Strindberg makes a point of saying the apartment building is like a Tower of Babel, and there are bunch of people with linked destinies who don’t know each other. So I thought that it’d be great if we really saw everybody, if we saw all five spaces at the same time. Of course, with a small stage, that became a little daunting because you often divide up the stage when you do something like that. We’ve all seen those British farces where half the stage is one apartment and half the stage is the other apartment. Just imagine if you were to do that with five apartments with how little real estate we have at Cutting Ball. Thinking about that problem was how we came up with the idea of arcade staging, and Paul’s knowledge of theater history really helped. It will allow us to have a station for each scene that will live upstage, while individual scenes will take over the downstage. They’ll live upstage, and they’ll take over the downstage when it’s that scene’s turn.

Paul Walsh:
Plus, our set designer Michael Locher has given us these incredible, magical cabinets that we use in each of the plays. I think those cabinets offer an elegant solution to the problem of trying to stage five plays in a theater with almost no storage space. We don’t want to have 30-minute turnarounds between each play. These cabinets create an incredible power of space, just in their existence. Here we can line up the five cabinets, each one representing a different space. One of the things I noticed last night in the reading was that Strindberg has a long passage in the play of unspoken action. And yet, there’s dialogue that takes place between characters, it’s just that the audience doesn’t hear it. That made me wonder if he wasn’t experimenting with silent film acting techniques. We’re expanding that into other unspoken scenes that are going to be taking place simultaneously and really looking at how mimed action interacts with spoken action.

Bennett Fisher:
One thing that really excites me about that staging as well is whereas the human characters are sort of confined to their little apartments, the supernatural characters can move all over the stage Monologues which might otherwise be just devoid of action because they are just description now, with this staging, become active. The Tomte or the angel can reference each of the characters in their own little area.

Rob Melrose:
Absolutely.

Bennett Fisher:
Another thing that we talked about early on in this process is conflicting ideas of nostalgia and progress in The Black Glove. Paul mentioned in the workshop that there’s a lot of the play that feels very nostalgic – the nostalgia that comes with Christmas, the nostalgia of folklore with the Tomte. But, we also get a lot of references to the way the world is changing at the turn of the century: technological innovations, the new style of high rise buildings, and other elements of the industrial revolution. How you see those two forces either in concert or in competition in the play?

Paul Walsh:
It’s interesting that they’re not set up in juxtaposition. At one point, the caretaker wonders if the new machines that have been brought into the building have brought the Tomte in. And then he says that Ebba has claimed that she’s seen the Tomte riding at the top of the elevator, holding onto the wires. So it’s not a “good old time, bad new time” kind of commentary. That’s a very confusing and complex question that I can’t answer, but it’s fascinating! And so is Strindberg’s relationship to the modern, and the contemporary, and particularly to technological advances. He had one of the first private telephones in Stockholm. He moved into the Blue Tower because it was so modern. He really loved the modern in a sense. Yet, in some of his short stories in various places, he was puzzled by and maybe even terrified by the notion of electricity, of the dynamo.

Rob Melrose:
We have these design meetings where we read in the play, “he takes out a flashlight” or “she takes out a vacuum cleaner”, and each time we thought that Paul was updating here because flashlights weren’t invented then, and vacuums weren’t invented then. But we looked it up and we saw that at the time of the writing, these things had been invented two years ago and they look very close to what we have now! It’s amazing! It’s a little like someone today putting an iPhone in a play.

Paul Walsh:
There’s a particular scene in the play that could not have been written just a few years before. And that’s the conversation on the telephone. A brand new kind of scene, a brand new technique for a scene, is to have somebody carrying on a conversation on the telephone, and us not being able to hear the other side. So that’s an amazing, innovative use of the new technology for dramaturgical purposes. Now we take those things for granted. A conversation on the telephone is obvious to us, but back then in 1909, it wasn’t so obvious!

Bennett Fisher:
I think that can be said about a lot of these plays. There’s so much that we take for granted now in terms of theatrical innovation, staging techniques, et cetera. One of the most exciting things I’m finding about working on the Chamber Plays is that we’re going back down the trail of theater history a hundred years with Strindberg’s writing and finding seedlings that later grew into expressionism, American poetic realism, absurdism, and the avant-garde. Even a century later, over a century, they are each very daring and experimental. And each daring and experimental in a different way.