SCENES  FROM  A  MARRIAGE  at the New York THEATRE WORKSHOP

(Seen September 27, 2014)


After a melange in the first act, the second act becomes a melee!  Director Ivan Van Hove has turned the  classic Bergmann film into another of his experimental exercises.  The result is an unfocussed journey of a couple's various stages of relationship, with three disparate couples depicting the same couple as they age and as their marriage disintegrates.

For no other reason than an errant device, he has divided the NYTW space into three small theatre areas.  He has parts of the audience move to an adjacent space after each half-hour scene.  Eventually, the audience comes together for the second act, after the theatre barriers are removed.  The only thing this device achieves is a lack of comprehension --- which is also contributed to by having his actors feign a sense of improvisation.

Unfortunately, at none of the stages of the marriage, do any of the three different couples ever show a chemistry of attraction to one another, which makes us doubt that a relationship could ever begin!  The wife, especially in the final stage of the marriage, is an excessively needy woman, who is often self-destructive.

In the sercond act,  all six actors interact with one another, often switching their time differences.  The improvisational feeling of the script is enhanced to a point of total unreality.  Van Hove even has a scene of the eldest Johan uncharacteristically dragging his wife by her legs across the huge expanse of the now theatre-in-the-round stage.

The whole second act is unnecessarily drawn out, and misses any insight as to why they act the way they do!

Van Hove's approach to theatre, as evidenced by this and his previous work at NYTW,  seems to  be attempts to deconstruct established theatre pieces simply for the sake of deconstruction!@