Heart of Darkness

By T.E. Kalem

CREDITORS

by AUGUST STRINDBERG

When Strindberg's four-year-old son asked him whether God could see in the dark, the playwright answered: "No. but Papa can."

All of Strindberg's life and work was a long night's journey into night lit only by the searing flashes of his erratic genius. If his son had asked him for a definition of hell, he would have answered "Hell is women," for he was neurotically afflicted with the conviction that they were the demons at the heart of darkness.

In Creditors, which is being given a potent revival at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in Manhattan, Strindberg returns to this broody theme but with traces of self-mocking humor and shy tendrils of affection that lighten his customarily Stygian mood.

Nonetheless, the battle of the sexes turns out, as ever, to be a minor holocaust. The combatants: one wife and two husbands. The first husband (Rip Torn) arrives incognito to strike up a friendship with the second husband (John Heard), an artist at a Swedish resort hotel. Systematically, satanically, the older man destroys the younger. He suggests that he give up painting to become a sculptor and then deplores his sculpting. He arouses fears about his health, plants doubts about his wife's fidelity and certainties about her leeching parasitism.

When the wife (Geraldine Page) appears, the first husband proceeds to win her back while his successor eavesdrops in agony from the neighboring room.

Strindberg, of course, means us to view the wife as the catalytic agent in both men's pain and disaster.

What comes through is something larger than that. There is a general sense of ominous guilt and the specific, fatalistic conviction that an individual can only choose between crippling dependency or terrifying isolation. It is a mea sure of Strindberg's enduring power as a dramatist that he can inflict upon his characters and upon us the abnormal tensions he felt himself. The night closes in like an unrelenting vise until only the nightmare remains.

The cast is superbly fitted to its task.

John Heard, as the second husband, is an appealingly stingless jellyfish. Despite her slightly mannered delivery of certain lines, Geraldine Page is a co quettish flirt while remaining a sexual feline with unretracted claws. Rip Torn has an affinity for Strindberg; he drinks up his part as if it were hemlock with a sprig of mint. A frequently underestimated actor, Torn exudes a combustible sense of imminent danger that makes him one of the most powerful presences on the U.S. stage.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.