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Reviewed by:
  • Rosmersholm
  • Sarah Balkin
Rosmersholm. By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Elinor Renfield. The Pearl Theatre Company. New York City Center Stage II, New York City. 20 November 2010.

Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm (1886), which had not received a major Equity run since 1977, depicts a society where political efficacy requires abandoning ideals in favor of partisan, selectively truthful versions of reality constructed by the media. Notable for its parallels to present-day America, Elinor Renfield's production yoked the construction of partisan realities to a struggle for semantic control over domestic space, and questioned the universal value accorded to the ancestral home of the title. Through direction, lighting, and depictions of media rhetoric, Renfield's production defamiliarized and distorted how personal and political perspectives appeared within the play. The production's distortions of domestic space suggested that Ibsen's central concern in Rosmersholm was not only divergent constructions of reality, but also the outmoded ideological and social foundation that shaped those realities.

The Pearl Theatre Company chose an apt cultural moment to revive Rosmersholm, which stages a battle for political and semantic control over domestic space through divergent, media-driven constructions of reality. The play's liberal and conservative factions are equally keen to enlist the


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Austin Pendleton (Doctor Kroll) and Bradford Cover (Johannes Rosmer) in Rosmersholm. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.)

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Margot White (Rebecca West) and Bradford Cover (Johannes Rosmer) in Rosmersholm. (Photo: Gregory Costanzo.)

support of Johannes Rosmer (played by Bradley Cover), a former pastor who has embraced liberal ideals. The characters fight for Rosmer's allegiance not because Rosmer is inherently powerful, but because Rosmersholm and the Rosmer name stand for tradition, nobility, and de facto conservatism in the surrounding community. Through Rebecca West, the upwardly mobile engine behind Rosmer's shift to liberalism, the play shows both the endurance of traditional domestic ideology and its stagnation. In act 1, Rebecca dominated the set, filling it with fresh flowers (which Rosmer's dead wife Beata hated) and giving orders to the housekeeper, Mrs. Helseth. Following Mike Poulton's adaptation and translation, Margot White's Rebecca repeatedly laughed in the face of political opposition and provincial superstition in the first act. The significance of this laughter was not apparent until Mrs. Helseth (Robin Leslie Brown) revealed a Rosmersholm tradition: in this house, children never cry and adults never laugh. The disappearance of Rebecca's laughter over the course of the play signaled the dominance of Rosmer traditions, as well as the loss of vitality they entail.

If Rebecca tried and ultimately failed to revitalize Rosmersholm through her role as mistress of the house, the conservative Doctor Kroll (Austin Pendleton) and the liberal Peder Mortensgaard (Dominic Cuskern) imposed their political perspectives on the house through media rhetoric. Rosmer's political shift and scandalous unmarried cohabitation with Rebecca spurred journalistic warfare between these characters, whose partisan newspapers publish whatever versions of the truth are most useful to their causes. Rosmersholm's centrality to each character's agenda suggested the disingenuousness of political disputes that share social and rhetorical foundations, both in the play and in our own society. Moreover, Mortensgaard's open hypocrisy and political success, which Ibsen's play calls the way of the future, connects the media with disparate versions of reality. This connection was familiar to an American audience accustomed to seeing partisan, contradictory realities on every news network and suggested that Rosmersholm's projected future was our present.

If Ibsen's play projects a future that Renfield's audience recognized as our present reality, Stephen Petrilli's subtle lighting design depicted Rosmersholm as steeped in tradition at the expense of its own futurity. Rosmersholm's respectable interiors were beautifully executed in blues and purples. The lighting retroactively created the impression that Rebecca's dual mission—to become the mistress of Rosmersholm, and to make Rosmer an agent of enlightenment—was [End Page 456] doomed to failure from the start. Abstract patterns of light were projected across walls and floors at intervals throughout the performance. After Rebecca and Rosmer drowned themselves at the end of the play, the light projection was...

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