Bennett Fisher:
Paul, the first day of our workshop you said that there’s a case to be made to call Strindberg the father of modern drama. How does The Ghost Sonata help him earn that mantle?

Paul Walsh:
I joke that Strindberg may be the father of modern drama, but if he is, then he’s an absentee father. Strindberg is an absentee father not only because he was often absent from his own family; he’s also absent from our stages in a remarkable way. For somebody who has had such an enormous impact on 20th-century dramaturgy, we rarely have the opportunity to see his plays produced, and if we do it’s usually the same two or three plays of the 63 he wrote. The Ghost Sonata is one of those plays that we can occasionally see. It’s one of the most produced of his dream-like plays. It’s a play that’s very much rooted in the beginnings of the 20th century. It looks with curiosity and a bit of terror at the enormous changes that were taking place at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. It dissolves the notion of dramatic character and dramatic action in a very interesting and exciting way. It places the central persona of the writer on the stage. It’s a play that was written for a small space, like so much of the innovative, imaginative theater work of the 20th century. And it has an intimacy about it. It talks to its audience on a very personal level through the small, controlled gestures of the actor. I think all of those things have contributed to the innovative nature of The Ghost Sonata and to the innovative nature of 20th-century drama. It’s not a play that is driven by action. It’s a play that’s driven by recurring motifs and echoes and some ghost-like animations. It’s difficult to get a hold of the personages as dramatic characters in the sense that Ibsen or Chekhov would’ve used that notion at the end of the 19th century. These are strange animations of emotions and passions and coincidences. I think that Strindberg’s exploration of jealousy within each of the Chamber Plays, but particularly in The Ghost Sonata, as a displaced cause is extraordinary and something that still resonates with us in the beginning of the 21st century. I think that his dematerialized stage seems to have a foot in the world as we experience it in daily life—the realistic world—but at the same time, leans towards a supernatural or preternatural world. All of those things are aspects of his dramaturgy that continue to resonate with us in the 21st century.

Rob Melrose:
If you see The Ghost Sonata through the eyes of a student—and you can look at it through the eyes of many, many characters—but from the eyes of a student, it’s about being pulled through a number of miraculous, amazing experiences. One amazing thing leads to the next amazing thing and each one is more astounding than the previous one. It’s almost like Dante where he finds himself at this crucial point in his life and he goes through an inferno and then a purgatory and then a paradise, but it’s a very modern version of it. The themes introduced in one part echo through the play like a piece of music – it’s called The Ghost Sonata after all. Take the young Milk Maid. She appears and reappears, and we only discover what she really signifies much later in the play. At the ghost supper, the old man tells everybody what he thinks of them and exposes their lies and lets them know that he thinks that they’re all liars and that he’s going to unmask them. And then in the next act, we find out that the Student’s father did that exact same thing.

Paul Walsh:
The paradise that the Student enters in the third scene of the play—the Hyacinth Room—proves to be just as infernal as the street where he began the play. So ultimately, it’s a world that Strindberg describes as a madhouse and a prison-house. It has a darkness to it that I think contemporary audiences can continue to recognize and identify with. Language in each of these plays, and in The Ghost Sonata in particular, is not a tool for communication, but a tool for dissimulation, a tool for hiding one’s secrets, a way of keeping from revealing one’s self, and that’s extraordinary in terms of the new trends that drama will take in the beginning of the century as well—the reexamination of the function of language itself and how it operates on stage, how it operates to both create character and conceal character.

Bennett Fisher:
The transformation of language in Strindberg’s plays is a lot like what Martin Esslin talks about in the Theater of the Absurd.

Paul Walsh:
Yes.

Bennett Fisher:
We’re asked to examine what truth really is, or whether a dream-truth or an absurdist-truth can be more truthful than what you can see empirically.

Rob Melrose:
Yeah, I think so.

Bennett Fisher:
Paul, you alluded to the trials that the Student undergoes throughout the play and his revelation that things are not as they seem or that there’s kind of an underlying pessimism about the world – in that what appears to be paradise is not. Do you think this reflects Strindberg’s philosophical beliefs as an author? Is there a lesson at the end of The Ghost Sonata?

Paul Walsh:
I don’t think it’s a thesis play in the sense that it ends with a clear moral, but I think that there’s an experience that Strindberg is mapping out for his audience—a journey that some members of the audience will take and some members of the audience won’t. And I think that he’s interested in that possibility of multiple responses. The play ends with a white light. There’s a scene of death and then a white light, and that white light appears frequently within the Chamber Plays. There’s a sense of a cleansing, a redemption, and a reconciliation that each of these plays ends with, which is a way through that pessimism to something else. Strindberg’s approaching the end of his life. In his letters he writes that he’s pretty much done with life and ready for the end—young man though he is, at a mere 58 . But there is also a sense of continuing to struggle, continuing to fight against the things he feels are worth fighting against, even as he’s trying to find a way of reconciling himself with life as a preparation for death. And it’s that death that we see at the end of each of the plays represented by that white light. That white light is a kind of transformation. The German Romantics would talk about a transformation of the body into spirit, and there’s a quality of that in the end of each of these plays represented by the harshness of a white light.

Rob Melrose:
One thing that has excited me about Strindberg from the beginning is that he kind of redefines what theater is in each play he writes. He’s always challenging his conception of what a play should be. I used to think “oh and here are these Chamber Plays”—which is this kind of singular, new idea about what theater is. But as I’ve been working on them, I’ve been realizing that each one is slightly different in its ideas about what theater is. And in The Ghost Sonata itself, there are three scenes and the rules of each scene are very different. The language in scene three, which is this very beautiful, ornate, poetic language about flowers and love and ideals is really, really different from the language of the street in scene one. So I’ve been getting really excited and it makes it a great project for Cutting Ball to do because we tend to like to do authors who kind of push our idea about what theater is and I just realized in working on it that Strindberg’s kind of the master—that even within a play he’ll change the rules, and that’s been really exciting and it’s been pushing and challenging me.

Paul Walsh:
The other thing that’s extraordinary about a play like The Ghost Sonata is that it really requires the physical bodies of the actors because it’s all about physicalizing metaphors. It’s not that a woman thinks she’s a parrot, but she’s actually a parrot, so that the metaphor of that becomes physicalized in reality through the body of the actor. I think that’s why this play particularly has been so exciting for modern directors to approach. It allows for a theatrical vocabulary that can be different every single time the play is produced and allows for the director to put his or her fingerprints all over it—put a stamp on it that’s specific to the style of theater at that moment or the style of theater they’re creating for the future. It’s a piece that really celebrates the proximity of the actor to the audience. It’s a piece that really celebrates the imaginative gesture, even if it’s a tiny gesture, because it’s done in an intimate space; or an enormous gesture if it’s done as a huge dance-theater piece. So it’s a play that can be done any number of different ways and still remains true to its multifarious and multivalent text.

Bennett Fisher:
Is there a particular moment in the play, a line or an instant that really pops out for you as the sort of crystalline example of The Ghost Sonata at its finest or something that you feel encapsulates the spirit of the play in a gesture?

Rob Melrose:
One of the things that sticks out right away is this conversation between the old man and the young man. The old man seems to know things about the young man. A lot of coincidences, right? He’s showing us that this is a world where unseen powers are bringing things together. You get the sense that the old man’s been planning this. Another moment that I just love is at the ghost supper when the old man kind of tears everyone down and says “we’ve been lying” and he says that languages are actually used to hide things rather than to reveal things. He thinks he’s got everybody in the palm of his hands and then the Mummy, the woman, stops the clock and says she can stop time. Then, she reveals that she knows secrets of the old man’s. I think that turn of events is really exciting. He winds up taking her place in the closet as the parrot, which is pretty incredible.

Paul Walsh:
It’s a play of great moments, for sure. And again, it’s one of the things that draws us to it. There’s a moment in the third scene when the cook comes in to disrupt this beautiful love scene between the Student and the young lady and they describe her as a vampire and as this big, fat, grotesque creature who’s taking all the nutrients out of the food.

Rob Melrose:
That’s a terrific moment too.

Paul Walsh:
You have to remember, Strindberg died of stomach cancer, so food was of some importance to him. At one point the Student says “leave” and the cook says “I’ll go when I’m ready—I’m ready.” I just love that line because it’s so bizarre—it’s funny and it’s so strange.

Bennett Fisher:
There was a wonderful moment in rehearsal where Paul, you looked at a line and actually changed the translation closer to the original, which had even stranger syntax and more deliciously unclear, bizarre language.

Paul Wash:
I’ve certainly tried in my translation to remain accurate. So could say that I changed a line, but in fact I corrected it! The line was wrong and now it’s right.

Bennett Fisher:
It’s been very interesting to watch the entire ensemble come to accept the strangeness of this piece—not to smooth out the wrinkles, but actually to embrace them as the idiosyncrasies that make this play so beguiling.

Paul Walsh:
Certainly. This isn’t a well made-made play in which things unravel like clockwork. The clock here doesn’t really work. Moments in the play, characters in the play, figures in the play have the wrong will and sometimes that will is completely disruptive of the dramaturgy of the play, completely disruptive of the structure and of the forward drive of the play. Everything is possible is the world that Strindberg’s chosen to put on stage here.

Bennett Fisher:
The Ghost Sonata has been produced hundreds—maybe even thousands of times in its history, but we’re the first theater to produce it alongside the other four Chamber Plays. I’m interested to hear what you feel the presence of those other plays in rep does to our interpretation of The Ghost Sonata—how their stories and their ideas change the way we watch that play and what The Ghost Sonata adds to that mosaic that the other plays do not have.

Rob Melrose:
I’m trying to think of The Ghost Sonata as the peak of the mountain – we’ve got two plays going into The Ghost Sonata and two plays coming out of The Ghost Sonata. And yes, The Ghost Sonata is teaching me things about the other plays. Paul has actually directed The Pelican before and Paul did some wonderful things to really bring out the metaphysical world. There’s always some kind of ghostly presence in the plays. When you just see one on it’s own, they’re all kind of new and interesting, but I think it’s much more satisfying to know what are motifs and what are grace notes.

Paul Walsh:
And there are many verbal echoes and continuing, ongoing metaphors that are explored in slightly different ways in each play, but there’s nothing as spectacular as the ghost’s supper in any of the other plays or even as spectacular as the Hyacinth Room. Nevertheless, there are addenda, alterations and variations of each of those scenes in each of the other plays, so that the tapestry grows richer the longer you look at it. Looking at these five plays as a unit is extraordinary. Strindberg wrote four of them very quickly within a short period of time then added the fifth two years later, so it’s not surprising that the same motifs appear again and again.

Bennett Fisher:
But not in a way that feels repetitious. Even though each of these five plays deal with a lot of common issues—memory, regret, settling accounts, coming to terms with the past or dealing with the consequences of the past— Strindberg’s handling those issues really differently from play to play.

Paul Walsh:
You see the concerns that he was dealing with and trying to come to terms with, but at the same time there is a richness to the variety of ways that he approaches these obsessions of his and that enrich one and the next. In our production, just the task of identifying which actors would play which roles allowed us to identify similarities of character and differences of character. I think that’s a very interesting thing and will be interesting for our audience to be able to track through these plays with the same actors.

Bennett Fisher:
I think there’s variation within this play as well. Rob made a reference to Dante earlier, and I think he’s right that each scene offers a different landscape with three different laws of physics, if you will, governing their own particular theatrical universe.