What the Swedes Did Over Summer Vacation

The Playbill claims that Through
a Glass Darkly takes place in 1960 on an island off the coast of Sweden,
but you’d never know it from Takeshi Kata’s austerely elegant set, which
practically screams “Hamptons summer share” via its wintry blue-gray color
scheme. And as the quartet of characters in Jenny Worton’s stage adaptation of
Ingmar Bergman’s film quarrel, cavil and grouse for 90 minutes, they seem
likelier and likelier candidates for New Yorkers’ favorite summer destination.
Or, perhaps more aptly, for yet another tasteful, bloodless production from
director David Leveaux, currently represented on Broadway with the emotionally
flatlining Arcadia.

—

Patriarch David (Chris Sarandon) is a writer struggling to
capture on the page his first insight after 12 novels. David’s teenaged son Max
(Ben Rosenfield) is a tangle of hormones; his sister Karin (Carey Mulligan) and
her husband Martin (Jason Butler Harner) struggle to keep the peace between
father and son, while Karin grapples with her spiraling sanity.

The problem inherent in adapting a film like Through a Glass Darkly is that the
theater is reliant on words, while movies have the option of cutting to a
charged close-up to convey emotion. So instead of harshly beautiful pain, we
have endless talk—most of it painfully dull. A tense al fresco dinner scene
revolves around Max’s freshly written play and David’s lack of thoughtfulness
in gift giving. Karin and Martin argue about her role as family peacemaker;
Martin and David discuss Karin’s precarious health. Intermittently, disembodied
voices swell, prompting Karin to wander to a wall and slide her hand through
it. The other side is calling her, but she can’t go until everyone’s had their
say.

That say turns out to not be very interesting by the play’s
end, through no fault of the actors. Mulligan, who last appeared on a New York
stage in the 2008 Broadway revival of The
Seagull prior to her breakout film role in An Education, here flaunts both a deeper talent (and voice) than
her performance in that film revealed. Her Karin is a woman struggling with the
realities of family life, from mothering her younger brother to calming her
husband’s rising concerns regarding her mental health. That she will ultimately
fail and that her failure is obvious from the very beginning of the play (even
for those who have not seen the film) means that Mulligan spends most of the
play trying and mostly succeeding at swimming upstream. But even Mulligan is
unable to make a climactic encounter between Karin and Max seem like anything
other than a scene lifted from the film simply because it was there.

As the men in Karin’s life, Sarandon, Rosenfield and Harner
imbue what are little more than archetypes (Distant Father, Sensitive Teen,
Anguished Spouse) with vivacity. Leveaux coaxes affecting performances from
them, but never requires anyone on the stage to dig beneath the surface of the
writing, relying instead on lighting cues from David Weiner and the creepy
sound design of David Van Tieghem to cue the audience’s emotional reaction.
What should be a wrenching climax is instead a noisy, shadowy display of
technical pyrotechnics, burying beneath it the human beings supposedly being
represented. Instead of the Hamptons’ White Party, what we have here is
Sweden’s blue-gray affair, complete with stylish mental breakdown.

Through a Glass Darkly

Through July 3, New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St.
(betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), www.ticketcentral.com; $65.

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