La Valse

By T.E. Kalem

UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

by Arthur Schnitzler

In an English version

by Tom Stoppard

In a codicil to his will, the Austrian man of letters Arthur Schnitzler instructed that a needle be thrust through his heart to remove any doubt of his death. As a novelist, short-story writer and playwright, best known for La Ronde, he had already probed the heart of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie with the lethal needle of wit, irony and skepticism, and pronounced it irrevocably dead.

The Vienna of his day (1862-1931) was phosphorescent in decay: Schnitzler's contemporaries numbered Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler and Adolf Hitler. Schnitzler chose to puncture that neurasthenic society's pretensions to honor, its pursuit of frivolity and its moral numbness. He knew the absurdity of doubling one's speed when one has lost all sense of direction.

That, in essence, is what Undiscovered Country is all about. The play is being given an ably acted, stylishly assured U.S. premiere by Connecticut's Hartford Stage Company. Britain's Tom Stoppard has provided his own idiomatic touches in one thoroughly civilized dramatist's salute to another.

The play begins with a suicide and ends with a duel. There is plenty of cynical merriment in between. At the center of the drama is an elegant couple, Friedrich Hofreiter (Keith Baxter) and his wife Genia (Jennifer Harmon). He is a light bulb manufacturer with a roving eye, and she practices blind decorum as high diplomacy.

Neither is shocked to learn that a brilliant young pianist has killed himself out of unrequited love for Genia, or that Friedrich has been gallivanting with the wife of a mutual friend. Each is slightly chagrined by the booby traps set by their own hearts and in the hearts of others.

An accelerating waltz of death takes place against a gilded backdrop of a country villa, with the late summer afternoon plink and plonk of tennis matches offstage, and a snowbound resort hotel in the Dolomites. Mark Lamos, in his auspicious debut season as artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company, has boldly chosen to set his stage so sparely that some of the claustrophobic density of the drama is diluted. But he has distanced his characters from each other in their most intimate encounters so that what playgoers feel most acutely is the frosty chill around their dead souls.

--By T.E. Kalem

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