When We Dead Awaken

In Prague and Vienna, a visitor sometimes sees buildings erected around 1900 adorned with life-size or larger figures sinuously wrapped around thresholds or ascending cornices.  The figures are nude maidens and youths and they are sculpted to aspire upward.  The young women writhe as if they were drowning -- their hands are like flames that seem to clutch for a surface of water just beyond their grasp.  The boys are boneless and their heads are tilted backward in ecstasy, lips slightly open as if to exhale their souls as some kind of fiery and gaseous essence. Both boys and maidens have a mortuary aspect -- their eyes are dead and their smooth, marmoreal faces seem to mark tombs.  They are beautiful because they are dead or, perhaps, dead because they are beautiful.

Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken was composed 1899.  It is a strenuous production involving many exorbitant proclamations of love, hate, and suffering and the show ends high above one of Norway's misty fjords with a great avalanche that sweeps away the protagonist and his female nemesis.  The show has never been popular and it is, perhaps, too rarefied for most theater-goers, an uncanny masque that is more like a Noh play than Ibsen's famous, and, often, lengthy, problem plays addressing social issues.  (I hasten to note that even those works, however, often involve spooky elements that are symbolically apt but realistically questionable.)  In a few years, Freud would commence his famous work, part of which addresses the perennial question of "what do women really want?"  Ibsen pioneered this territory and the female characters that he creates in his later works are literally femme fatale -- we can't tell exactly what they desire or why, but we know their objective:  the complete destruction of their male counterparts.  Hedda Gabler takes a shot with a gun at one of her ex-boyfriends; the girl in The Master Builder is a Lorelei who entices the hero up onto the steeple of his highest tower from which, of course, he is fated to fall to his death.  Irene, the catalyst for the drama in When We Dead Awaken, similarly drags the hero, the great sculptor Rubek to his doom.  She bears a grudge against him because Rubek earlier in his life defined her as his artistic muse.  Being a muse is not easy work and poorly compensated to boot.  Irene posed naked for Rubek's greatest work, a sculptural ensemble called "The Resurrection", but she was never exactly central to his art (or his life) and when he dismissed her after the work was done, characterizing this as an "episode" in his life, she seems to have gone stark, raving mad.  She traipses around like a zombie, pale as a cadaver and wearing spooky white cerements.  Hidden in her bosom is a little dagger that she says that she has used to slaughter her last husband as well as "dozens of (her) children."  Although Rubek's abandonment has driven her insane, she wasn't exactly a model of mental health before he left her -- at one point, she says that while posing naked for Rubek she longed for him to embrace her; in the same breath, she notes that if he had done that she would have pulled a long needle from where it was hidden in her hair and pierced either his heart or his eye.  Irene's startling reappearance in Rubek's life is a "return of the repressed," a turning that will both reinvigorate and destroy the great artist. 

Clearly, Irene bears the symbolic burden of being Rubek's inspiration, perhaps, even an embodiment for his imagination, a faculty that is now deadened and that has turned numbly toward self-destruction.  The other characters are similarly allegorical.  Rubek's young wife, Maia, represents the yearning to be free, the desire to be loved, the sexual instinct, and, also, paradoxically the stultifying effects of marriage.  Maia and Rubek encounter Ulfheim, an exotic figure like a character in Peer Gynt.  Ulfheim is a bear hunter, a vigorous and passionate man of action, and, of course, he incites a great deal of conflicted lust in Rubek's unfortunate spouse.  The plot is simple in the extreme.  Irene, Rubek's muse, appears as a living corpse at a mountain spa where Maia and Rubek are fruitlessly bickering.  Rubek immediately renews his passionate relationship with the mad woman, not aware as even the dullest member of the audience knows, that she is his nemesis and will contrive his death.  Rubek's emotional infidelity frees Maia to flirt with Ulfheim, the bear-slayer.  The four characters end up on a rocky defile high in the mountains.  A storm arises.  Ulfheim saves Maia by carrying her down the mountain.  Rubek and Irene perish in an avalanche.  In this late Romantic mise en scene every element is symbolic.  The mountainous landscape, the sound effects of babbling brooks and laughing children, as well as the characters and their heightened discourse all mean something beyond, and additional to, their literal reality.  The essential Agon or struggle in the drama, its conflict, is between the aspirations of the characters as actual people, as flesh-and-blood, and the limitations of their symbolic or allegorical roles.  For instance, Irene is an embodiment of the muse, a symbol for the dead end of fin-de-siecle esthetics, and, probably, Rubek's artistic imagination -- but she is also meant to be a figure with whom we can identify on a literal flesh-and-blood level.  Rubek is a man struggling with his sense that he is allegorical figure for all the aspirations of late Romantic art -- he's like Aschenbach in Mann's roughly contemporaneous Death in Venice, the last representative of a movement that has exhausted itself.  Maia both materializes the sexual repression against which Ibsen rages, but, also, is supposed to be a plausible female character.  Ulfheim is so wholly symbolic that he seems cartoonish -- he doesn't suffer any conflict because the archetypal dragon-slayer, the man of action and nothing but action never has any second thoughts or regrets about what he does.  It is often observed that Ibsen's mature works, beginning with Brand and Peer Gynt, start out in the open air of Norway's fjords and glaciers.  The rest of the dramas take place in closed domestic spaces and, indeed, are claustrophobic -- the "wild duck", for instance, in the play of that name, spends its whole life in an attic.  But in his last play, Ibsen again tears down the walls and stages the climax of the work in the mountains.  It is a mistake to see When We Dead Awaken, however, as a reversion to the nature- romanticism of Peer Gynt.  Rather, the mountains and avalanche at the end of this last play represent a landscape that is wholly spiritualized, that is, a landscape that is entirely internal, a proto-expressionistic landscape that has dissolved into a representation of various states of the soul. 

I saw this show at the Commonweal Theater on April 31,  2017.  The production was simple but effective.  The mountain landscape was represented by a backdrop of brown goblin-shaped forms, painted to look like a malign pastry or Badlands hoodoos or giant trolls.  (I thought the shape of the mountains echoed the famous image of the vast and hairy troll shadowing Ibsen as he strolled down Oslo's Karl Johann's Gate for his lunch and midday beer at the Grand Café.)  A few irregular blocks represented cliffs and gorges and an elongated banner of glittery-looking blue fabric played the part of a rippling stream.  Hal Cropp was a suitably world-weary, cynical, and, yet ultimately passionate Rubek -- he successfully and vividly navigated Rubek's long discourses on the tribulations of the artist, and, further, made plausible the hero's gradual awakening from the torpor induced by his exhaustion and unhappy marriage to his doomed ecstasy among the peaks.  Elizabeth Dunn was effectively girlish as Maia and Eric Lee dashed about with bravado as the swashbuckling  Ulfheim -- he courts Rubek's wife by waving a bloody steak before her eyes and, then, cries out that his ravenous hounds "love to be teased."  Adrienne Sweeney was sepulchral as the cadaverous femme fatale, Irene.  She embodied the sort of hysterical neediness that has been both a snare and pitfall for men since the dawn of time.  The climax reminded me a bit of productions of Turandot that I have seen, another late flowering of the Romantic movement.  As the mountain makes thunderous sounds, Rubek and Irene shout out scarcely articulate cries of passion, slogans and mottos more than speeches.  Then, it is dark and there is a terrible roaring sound and, when the lights brighten, we see a vast and silent field of snow under which the lovers are entombed.  (I could have done without the overly explicit use of a transparency to show the lover's apotheosis within a cell in the mountains, a kind of honeyed shower-stall where Rubek and Irene are discovered in an embrace -- this was too Wagnerian for my taste and problematic thematically although de gustibus non disputandum...)  When We Dead Awaken, of course, is both a lavish example of symbolic and decadent late Romanticism and a thoroughgoing criticism of the excesses of that movement.  The glacial field of ice and snow that buries Rubek and Irene is the marble monument to a style of art and sensibility that has died and been buried with all due obsequies in Ibsen's last work for the theater. 

This is a fascinating show, thrilling at times, and deserves to be seen by as large an audience as possible.