In time for Valentine’s Day, Steppenwolf Theatre Company recently opened its run of August Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death.”
As the J Geils Band put it way back in 1980, love stinks. It’s a battlefield. In this case, it smells a bit Irish, too.
Written in 1900, Strindberg’s play involves Edgar, a rapidly aging, curmudgeonly, blowhard Swedish Army captain and his wife Alice, who is 15 years younger than he is and a one-time wannabe actress.
They live on a remote island in a lighthouse-like fortress that once served as a prison. As staged at the Steppenwolf, it is a foreboding, impressive set.
The terrifying two spend their days verbally lacerating each other in advance of their 25th wedding anniversary. Their familiarity breeds a vicious, boundless cycle of contempt.
Had they been around in the late 1970s, “Cruel to Be Kind” would have been a favorite song. As is, the Captain dances around like a puppet to “Entry March of the Boyars” that Alice plays on the piano.
One day, Alice’s cousin Kurt comes to town to run the local quarantine office. Kurt and Alice had a thing for each other. More like lust than love.
Kurt’s a divorced dad whom the courts disallow from seeing his own kids. Edgar might have had something to do with that – and might have had something to do with Kurt’s wife.
Yeah. Love stinks like lutefisk here.
Edgar and Alice eviscerate each other with verbal lye. The hate is strong with these two. They don’t seem to like anybody else. And nobody seems to like them.
Poor Kurt gets caught up in their morass. Lechery lurks, then rears its ugly head. Deception begets deception.
There’s a lot of begetting going on here. A good amount of drinking. A touch of vampirism, even.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Swedish without talk about death and faith, or lack thereof.
Truth is beyond relative here. Much like what we’re seeing in way too many places these days, for these three – particularly Edgar and Alice – reality is whatever fits their current schemes and narratives.
The couple loves to hate each other and thrives on vindictiveness. But for Kurt stopping by and maybe a ghost, misery is their only company.
They’re stuck with each other. They deserve each other.
If they were around in modern times, these two awful people would be internet influencers, star on a so-called reality TV show or be elected to higher office.
So if you’ve been through a bitter divorce or grew up in a house with bickering parents, this might bring on a bit of PTSD. Also, Bruce Springsteen has nothing to do with this show. You’re thinking of “Dancing in the Dark.”
But anyway.
While watching monsters may sound unpleasant, the way Steppenwolf stages “The Dance of Death,” there are a lot of laughs.
To mix Swedish media, while it sure ain’t ABBA, “The Dance of Death” is not exactly like the stereotype of an Ingmar Bergman movie.
Nor is it like one of those moody Scandinavian crime dramas you can find on the streamers – the ones with an attractive young female detective and/or a grizzled, shaggy guy with a drinking problem. The murders most frequently happen in the woods, even ones set in a city.
In the Steppenwolf version of “The Dance With Death,” the dark comedy shines through.
Jeff Perry plays Edgar with high energy, cartoon character cruelty. While not as physical in her performance as Alice, Kathryn Erbe, makes a great cunning foil, cavorting about with a calculated callousness. Cliff Chamberlain’s performance is more subdued, at least until the prot/antgonists bring out the beast in him.
The Steppenwolf version uses a translation from award-winning Irish playwright Conor McPherson.
Two years ago, McPherson’s Bob Dylan musical, “Girl From the North Country,” played in Chicago. For that work – at the very least – McPherson noted that Nobel Prize-winning Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill was an influence.
“Unspoken resentments, hopes and dreams and thwarted ambitions start to reemerge and come to the surface. That creates a lot of drama. You’ll find that structure in a lot of successful plays,” McPherson said in 2024 of the musical.
In the acceptance speech O’Neill wrote for getting the Nobel, he noted his works owed much to the influence of Strindberg – an influence O’Neill said “runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see.”
Bringing this back to Chicago, last year at this time, Steppenwolf staged another lurid look at love, Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.” Shepard’s work involves a cowboy type and a woman who just happen to have the same dad. Their old man was a bigamist.
The couple fell for each other in high school and may or may not have known they were related when they foolishly fell in love. Dad haunts the couple as they meet up once more at a fleabag hotel somewhere in the southwest in the early 1980s.
Things go up in flames, literally and figuratively.
As I learned last year per seeing that Steppenwolf production, one of the things that influenced Shepard to become a playwright was watching the 1962 film version of O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
O’Neill’s masterwork, first staged after his death, “explores themes of addiction, regret, familial dysfunction, and the inescapable influence of the past,” as the National Park Service website understates it. (O’Neill’s Tao House in Danville, CA is a National Historic Site.)
So credit the Irish for all this.
After all, these are current tips for Valentine’s Day dating, care of Ireland’s Garron Noone. Lest you forgot, Dublin is where they keep some of St. Valentine’s remains. And “The Dance of Death” runs through March 22, so you can see it in time for St. Patrick’s Day, too!
