August Strindberg: A Modernist in Spite of Himself

1 COMPARATIVE ? ama Volume 26___________Summer 1992___________Number 2 August Strindberg: A Modernist in Spite of Himself Göran Stockenström In creating a modern theatre which we hope will liberate for significant expression a fresh elation and joy in experimental production , it is the most apt symbol of our good intentions that we start with a play by August Strindberg; for Strindberg was the precursor of all modernity in our present theatre. Strindberg still remains among the most modern of moderns. ... He carried Naturalism to a logical attainment of such poignant intensity that, if the work of any other playwright is to be called 'naturalism,' we must classify a play like The Dance of Death as 'super-naturalism,' and place it in a class by itself, exclusively Strindberg's. He expressed it by intensifying the method of his time and by foreshadowing both in content and form the methods to come. All that is enduring in what we loosely call 'Expressionism'—all that is artistically valid and sound theatre—can be clearly traced back through Wedekind to Strindberg's A Dream Play, There Are Crimes and Crimes, The Spook Sonata etc. Hence The Spook Sonata at our Playhouse. One of the most difficult of Strindberg's 'behind-life' (if I may coin the term) plays GÖRAN STOCKENSTRÖM is a Professor in the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of Minnesota. He has published extensively on Strindberg and is currently preparing a critical edition of The Occult Diary 18961908 for the University of Minnesota Press. 95 96Comparative Drama to interpret with insight and distinction—but the difficult is properly our special task, or we have no good reason for existing. Truth, in the theatre as in life, is eternally difficult, just as the easy is the everlasting lie. —Eugene O'Neill O'Neill's recognition of Strindberg's importance to twentiethcentury theater can be found in the inaugural program for the new Provincetown Playhouse, which opened in New York with a production of The Spook [Ghost] Sonata on 4 January 1924.1 The avant-garde arts theater, directed by the famous triumvirate Kenneth Macgowan, Eugene O'Neill, and Robert Edmond Jones, rediscovered in Strindberg's "behind-life" plays submerged parts of an aesthetic theater tradition that they themselves advocated as the dominating form of modernism. Strindberg's view of man and his radically new stagecraft presented the needed challenge to their own attempts to transcend realism. From this perspective O'Neill argues Strindberg's central place in their new repertoire in a letter to Kenneth Macgowan: "That's experiment in this country. No one else dares to do him—yet we all laud him justly as one of the two or three 'great modern ones'."2 The new Provincetown Players' production of The Ghost Sonata was followed in 1926 by A Dream Play. Strindberg was made to serve as figurehead for the experimental studio theater in MacDougal Street under the banner of modernism , the general notion being one of revolutionary change from a mimetic realism, defined by preceding generations of theater practitioners in its use of language and dramaturgical techniques. In his program note "Strindberg and Our Theatre," O'Neill refers to Strindberg's post-Inferno plays. The dividing line in Strindberg's life and oeuvre is marked by the autobiographical diary-novel Inferno (1897) in which he describes and interprets the core of his existential experiences on the road to Damascus. Strindberg's plays are stories first, remembered because of what happened and mattered to him. Below the clouded and tangled patterns of events, and behind them, are experiences, psychological realities of passionate importance to him. These accumulations of passion, sin, and suffering were recorded by the dramatist and told through different tales on the stage. His plays represent incomplete and imperfect actions, calling for a before and an after, always asserting their larger patterns in history. On the stage his plays take on universal significance Göran Stockenström97 and simultaneously point inward to central meanings, trailing behind them the roots of his Inferno experiences. During a series of consecutive crises (1894-97) Strindberg's painful and bizarre psychic experiences entailed a loss of the...