Bennett Fisher:
Rob, you said on the first day of our workshop with Storm that there’s something delightfully ordinary about the play and about the way that the characters speak and interact. Could elaborate a little more on that?

Rob Melrose:
I feel like the style of each of the five plays is very different, and this one feels the most “slice of life.” It feels like a stroll. There is a plot, there is a drive, and dramatic things happen, but you can watch it for a while and not know what the play is going to be about. Just look at the beginning of the play. The Consul knocks on the window and invites his brother for a walk. The other brother says, “I’ll be right out.” While he’s waiting, the Consol gets in a conversation with the Confectioner, then the brother comes out and they go on a walk. They get separated and the other brother comes back in. Storm has this nice, meandering style to it. In the end, some very dramatic things happen, but they happen in a very gentle and elegant way.

Paul Walsh:
What’s been most surprising to me about working on Storm this past week is that it’s such a deceptive play. It seems on the surface to be one thing, but as you get going there are revelations that tell you that much else has already happened beneath the surface. It becomes this play of seething emotions that are kept in check, and the goal or the task for the actors is to reveal moments of those seething emotions even though the audience won’t understand where they’re coming from until later in the play. So it’s a play that you have to get all the way through to the end before you know what has happened in the beginning. I agree, it plays through as if it was a day in the life, but it’s a day that’s definitely unlike any other day.

Rob Melrose:
Absolutely.

Bennett Fisher:
This is the first Chamber Play Strindberg wrote. Paul, looking at where Strindberg’s coming from as a writer before this play, how is Storm kicking off this different phase and different interest for Strindberg as a writer? How does it compare to things he’s already written at this point in his career?

Paul Walsh:
I think that Storm is very interesting in the proximity it establishes between actor and audience. The audience is so close that they can read detailed and minute changes in the actors’ faces and in their tone of voice, and those will stand as clues to this deep structure. It’s not as metaphysical as some of the other plays. It doesn’t wander into the same kind of spooky environment as some of the other plays, but it does absolutely investigate the same notions of both jealousy and death that are key to the later plays. What’s more, it does it in a vocabulary that’s different from the plays he’s been writing up to this point. There’s this notion of intimacy that allows internal thoughts to be revealed to the audience separate from the language that they’re using to disguise those thoughts.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, we’re producing these plays in a black box theater, so this intimacy is already there in terms of the physical distance from the audience to the stage. How do you capture that intimacy and that quietness while still maintaining a level of tension and dramatic suspense?

Rob Melrose:
I adore Strindberg’s play Miss Julie because it’s such a power struggle between a man and a woman. The power dynamic keeps shifting and the sexual tension and the violence are right on the surface. Miss Julie is a very hot, hot play, while Storm is much more cool. I feel like there are things that are happening that are more subtle. Where Jean and Julie are kind of jockeying for who’s on top, here, the most interesting scene to me in Storm is when an ex-wife meets up with her ex-husband and they talk a little bit about the experience of seeing each other. One of the lines I love is when the wife says, “Am I so changed?” and the husband says, “Well, they say that in three to five years, all the atoms in your body change over, so actually the person standing in front of me isn’t the woman that I was married to.” As Paul suggests, it’s subtle jealousy. These characters don’t want to reveal their feelings as much as the characters in Miss Julie. Of course, the actor does reveal those feelings, but so much is held back. And it makes sense, given the world of the play. The Brother is a consul and he kind of keeps his cards close to his chest, which seems appropriate. When Gerda, the ex-wife, comes into the house, the house is exactly the same as she left it, but there are a few slight differences that suggest that maybe a new woman is there. She notices them and, in subtle ways, she asks about them. If she were Miss Julie, she might say something like “I want to drink from your skull.” Explode in that kind of extreme emotional outburst. It’s so much more subtle and delicate in Storm.

Paul Walsh:
It’s a play that’s both an iceberg and a volcano. I agree that the emotions are cool but the intensity is very, very hot beneath the surface.

Rob Melrose:
Absolutely.

Paul Walsh:
When Strindberg first started writing the play, he called it The First Lamp – a reference to the lighting of the gas lamp marking the coming of autumn at the very end of the play. But while he was writing, he came upon this new image of a flash of lightning that reveals something. That’s when he started talking about the play as Storm. I think this is a play that takes place through flashes of lightning, and that’s the key to it. These emotions become clear just for a split second, just for a moment, and then they disappear again. That’s an interesting experiment on his part, as to what constitutes both dramatic tension and dramatic action.

Bennett Fisher:
In this flash of lightning, the Gentleman sees his ex-wife Gerda standing with his brother, the Consul. How does that moment change the tone of everything that follows?

Paul Walsh:
When the Gentleman sees his former wife with his brother, it illuminates something from his past that he has buried. The Gentleman has made beautiful poems out of his past. He has gotten rid of all of those bad things, those bad memories, from his marriage of five years and made it into a kind of shrine to the home. And I think in that moment, that shrine to the home, those beautiful memories that have been turned into poems, go up in flames. . After that, the tension of suspicions grow. But the characters remain the same. They remain closed off. They remain convivial with one another.But I think that the underlying tensions and suspicions turn towards more overt accusations after that moment.

Bennett Fisher:
Of the five plays, Storm is perhaps the one most rooted in realism. Other plays have the direct presence of some sort of spiritual force or ghostly presence. A director might be tempted to produce this play in a totally naturalistic or realistic style, but we will be producing it with the other four Chamber Plays and with the same scenic and lighting elements, Will this bring out something expressionistic about Storm?

Rob Melrose:
We’ve set all five plays in a beautiful, century-old ballroom with a beautiful image of a Stockholm building on the back mural, and we’ve got these magic cabinets from which come all the scenic elements in the plays. I have good ideas about how to introduce it in The Ghost Sonata and how to introduce it in The Pelican, but I have to figure out how I’m going to introduce this concept with Storm. We are really going to solve this on our feet in rehearsal and see how it plays in the space. One idea is starting with the gambling that’s happening upstairs and then going into what’s happening. We’d contrast the cacophony of upstairs with the extreme quiet of the street, making the audience feel the rhythm of that first scene, which is beautifully meandering and easygoing and gentle. I think that might be a nice way to get the audience in tune with this much more subtle, under-the-surface performance, but that’s something I won’t know until we are on our feet. James Carpenter, who’s playing the Gentleman, has got a great handle on this already. In Burned House, one of the other plays, he’s really right on with the humor and the nastiness and the absurdity of that play. It’s completely different from what he does in Storm, which is he just kind of sits there and drops his jaw and just lets himself be affected by the presence of another person, and he’s just kind of great at that. Whatever design or aesthetic choices I make, they need to support that quality in his performance.

Paul Walsh:
I think sometimes the dichotomy of realism and expressionism gets in our way. We forget that at the turn of the century, there were dozens of movements and counter-movements and inspirations for exploring the human condition going on simultaneously. If, by expressionism, we mean the post-impressionism of Van Gogh, for instance, or the post-impressionism of Munch, or the post-impressionism of Gaugin – well, we have three very different approaches to things that continue to be rooted in a kind of observation of experienced reality. Strindberg called all of that realism, and he called these plays part of his movement toward the new naturalism, which was a kind of symbolist and philosophical and theosophical exploration of the human experience. I think that this play owes much to his predecessors in the French symbolist theater, particularly Maeterlinck in his exploration of the power and the strength of stillness. The quietness of this play and the stillness of this play are more of a response to than an embracing of Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy. Strindberg’s added a dramatic drive to his play that Maeterlinck’s plays often didn’t have, but explores stillness and the possibility of hearing words when there are no words in a way that owes much to Maeterlinck’s exploration of changes in the notion of dramatic language.

Bennett Fisher:
Rob, having directed Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande, do you see elements of that play in Storm?

Rob Melrose:
Certainly, but I think the Maeterlinck plays that influence Strindberg the most are Interior and Intruder, which are plays that take place in a little room and also have people outside looking in. Those two plays are almost like proto-Chamber Plays. But, when we were working on Pelléas and Mélisande, we talked a lot about people speaking soul to soul. I think there’s something true about this play too. The masks come off and the characters kind of pick apart their relationships. What creates the intimacy is their ability to be bare with each other and – at times – talk in a way that’s very, very frank. That stillness and that kind of beautiful language is here in the same way it is in Pelléas and Mélisande.