To Damascus: Damnation or deliverance
August 13, 2001 | 12:00am
On the anvils of Odin in the Land of the Midnight Sun were forged the metals of modern drama in the last two decades of the 19th century. The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen hammered into shape the bronze of the theater of realism and the Swede August Strindberg the iron of naturalism and the steel of expressionism.
Their weather-beaten forefathers had plowed the northern seas in their dragon-prowed vessels and crossed the Atlantic to the American continent centuries before Columbus. Similarly, Ibsen and Strindberg ventured into uncharted pathways when they abandoned the romanticism of their formative years and boldly sailed to unknown waters. Ibsen explored the inscape of social drama. His work was an iceberg that sank the Titanic of hypocritical bourgeois morality. In contrast, Strindberg’s craft plunged into the maelstrom of sexual conflict, a struggle for the lifeboat between the male and the female – a Darwinian battle for survival between opposing species.
Students of modern drama herded to the Pius XII Theater by their teachers to watch Journey to Damascus are likely to be exposed to the face of Strindberg that they have not seen in the classroom. The production by Dramatis Personae, presented in cooperation with the Embassy of Sweden, is certain to open their eyes to a less familiar side of the Swedish master of drama.
Students are certain to have read The Father and Miss Julie – naturalistic tragedies which depict the sexual conflict between male and female with cataclysmic intensity. A brooding pessimism hangs over these plays like the sense of doom over the Nordic gods of old. To the dramatist, love is a cruel confrontation between opposing forces which are bound by attraction and repulsion. Man and woman are fettered each to each by a love-hate chain and their struggle to free themselves from the bond can only end in disaster and death.
One anthologist made this observation on this conflict in the plays of Strindberg: "Its twin poles are a blind and bestial desire and a hatred toward the object which inspires such an enslaving passion."
His view of the female sex is the opposite of Ibsen’s feminism. He regarded woman as "a Dionysian force of nature which attempts to strangle the freedom-loving intellectuality and spirituality of the Apollonian male."
The Father depicts the struggle between the Captain and his wife, Laura, to win control over their only daughter. Laura schemes to drive her husband insane by sowing doubt in his mind about his paternity.
In Miss Julie, another dimension in appended to the battle of the sexes – the class struggle between a baron’s daughter, who represents an anemic aristocracy, and her father’s valet, who comes from peasant stock.
Two other plays of the same period, Comrades and Creditors, deal with the same enmity between the sexes in which the female psyche is dominated by instinct and passion.
Many years later, when Strindberg reprised the same theme once again, he introduced a new variation. As if to relent on his vicious attack on women in his earlier works, The Dance of Death exposes the sadistic character of an artillery captain in a remote military outpost who inflicts his cruelty on his wife who is by no means a pure, innocent soul.
On students of the theater whose knowledge of Strindberg is limited to his anti-feminist plays, Journey to Damascus will fall like a bolt from the blue. Here is the other face of a schizophrenic personality. The same seafarer who had sailed into the maelstrom and sunk into the abyss has risen to the surface and now floats on a raft on a serene and sunlit sea.
The class in Modern Drama will find the biography of the playwright in John Gassner’s Masters of the Drama illuminating.
Strindberg was the third of 11 children of an impoverished aristocrat and a barmaid. His parents got married only a few months after his birth. He lived in fear of his father in a crowded household. He had aspired to be Lutheran preacher but lost his faith. He began studies in medicine but gave up. He tried tutoring, telegraphy, writing for a newspaper and acting. He became a Deist, a pacifist, and a follower of the social philosophy of Utilitarianism. His three marriages brought him much unhappiness. And later in life, this wanderer reconverted to Christianity through the influence of Swedenborg. All these molded his neurotic personality and brought him close to insanity.
Journey to Damascus is a veiled autobiography that traces his spiritual crusade to find his lost faith. In the first half, The Stranger (Manuel Aquino) embarks on his quest. It is a surreal trek into the inscape of the soul and an examination of conscience at the same time. In the dream-state, The Stranger relives his life and summons the people in his past he has sinned against to enact their parts: The Lady (Divina Cavestany) he entices to leave her husband, The Doctor (Dingdong Rosales); The Beggar and The Old Man (Danny Magisa); The Mother (Ilma Barayuga); and the people in the monastery asylum.
At this point, the scholarly student will discover a meeting of the waters, as it were, between the aging Strindberg and the youth of his older contemporary, Ibsen. As the Norwegian had the anti-hero of his early years, Peer Gynt, who is suspended between heaven and hell, find salvation in the love and faith of Solveig, so likewise The Stranger is led to his redemption by the love and loyalty of the Lady.
The second half of the play is a reversal of the first half in which The Stranger exorcise the demons that hound him and, at last, find peace and deliverance.
The insightful artistic design and direction by Lito Casaje and the contributions of his artistic and production staff – Rodrigo Quinto, Joey de Guzman, Romelito Rivera, Luther Guma, Lito Perez – deserve credit for this production of Journey to Damascus.
Aquino and Cavestany need to be crowned with laurels for a deeply moving performance.
The young students who watch the play may well heed the words of The Mother when she tells The Stranger, "You know what the children need to do when they have been bad – first, they say they’re sorry and ask to be forgiven – and then they make things right again."
Perchance they may be struck by a bolt from the blue – and follow the Apostle Paul – and Strindberg – on the road to Damascus.
For comments and suggestions, e-mail jessqcruz@hotmail.com.
Their weather-beaten forefathers had plowed the northern seas in their dragon-prowed vessels and crossed the Atlantic to the American continent centuries before Columbus. Similarly, Ibsen and Strindberg ventured into uncharted pathways when they abandoned the romanticism of their formative years and boldly sailed to unknown waters. Ibsen explored the inscape of social drama. His work was an iceberg that sank the Titanic of hypocritical bourgeois morality. In contrast, Strindberg’s craft plunged into the maelstrom of sexual conflict, a struggle for the lifeboat between the male and the female – a Darwinian battle for survival between opposing species.
Students of modern drama herded to the Pius XII Theater by their teachers to watch Journey to Damascus are likely to be exposed to the face of Strindberg that they have not seen in the classroom. The production by Dramatis Personae, presented in cooperation with the Embassy of Sweden, is certain to open their eyes to a less familiar side of the Swedish master of drama.
Students are certain to have read The Father and Miss Julie – naturalistic tragedies which depict the sexual conflict between male and female with cataclysmic intensity. A brooding pessimism hangs over these plays like the sense of doom over the Nordic gods of old. To the dramatist, love is a cruel confrontation between opposing forces which are bound by attraction and repulsion. Man and woman are fettered each to each by a love-hate chain and their struggle to free themselves from the bond can only end in disaster and death.
One anthologist made this observation on this conflict in the plays of Strindberg: "Its twin poles are a blind and bestial desire and a hatred toward the object which inspires such an enslaving passion."
His view of the female sex is the opposite of Ibsen’s feminism. He regarded woman as "a Dionysian force of nature which attempts to strangle the freedom-loving intellectuality and spirituality of the Apollonian male."
The Father depicts the struggle between the Captain and his wife, Laura, to win control over their only daughter. Laura schemes to drive her husband insane by sowing doubt in his mind about his paternity.
In Miss Julie, another dimension in appended to the battle of the sexes – the class struggle between a baron’s daughter, who represents an anemic aristocracy, and her father’s valet, who comes from peasant stock.
Two other plays of the same period, Comrades and Creditors, deal with the same enmity between the sexes in which the female psyche is dominated by instinct and passion.
Many years later, when Strindberg reprised the same theme once again, he introduced a new variation. As if to relent on his vicious attack on women in his earlier works, The Dance of Death exposes the sadistic character of an artillery captain in a remote military outpost who inflicts his cruelty on his wife who is by no means a pure, innocent soul.
On students of the theater whose knowledge of Strindberg is limited to his anti-feminist plays, Journey to Damascus will fall like a bolt from the blue. Here is the other face of a schizophrenic personality. The same seafarer who had sailed into the maelstrom and sunk into the abyss has risen to the surface and now floats on a raft on a serene and sunlit sea.
The class in Modern Drama will find the biography of the playwright in John Gassner’s Masters of the Drama illuminating.
Strindberg was the third of 11 children of an impoverished aristocrat and a barmaid. His parents got married only a few months after his birth. He lived in fear of his father in a crowded household. He had aspired to be Lutheran preacher but lost his faith. He began studies in medicine but gave up. He tried tutoring, telegraphy, writing for a newspaper and acting. He became a Deist, a pacifist, and a follower of the social philosophy of Utilitarianism. His three marriages brought him much unhappiness. And later in life, this wanderer reconverted to Christianity through the influence of Swedenborg. All these molded his neurotic personality and brought him close to insanity.
Journey to Damascus is a veiled autobiography that traces his spiritual crusade to find his lost faith. In the first half, The Stranger (Manuel Aquino) embarks on his quest. It is a surreal trek into the inscape of the soul and an examination of conscience at the same time. In the dream-state, The Stranger relives his life and summons the people in his past he has sinned against to enact their parts: The Lady (Divina Cavestany) he entices to leave her husband, The Doctor (Dingdong Rosales); The Beggar and The Old Man (Danny Magisa); The Mother (Ilma Barayuga); and the people in the monastery asylum.
At this point, the scholarly student will discover a meeting of the waters, as it were, between the aging Strindberg and the youth of his older contemporary, Ibsen. As the Norwegian had the anti-hero of his early years, Peer Gynt, who is suspended between heaven and hell, find salvation in the love and faith of Solveig, so likewise The Stranger is led to his redemption by the love and loyalty of the Lady.
The second half of the play is a reversal of the first half in which The Stranger exorcise the demons that hound him and, at last, find peace and deliverance.
The insightful artistic design and direction by Lito Casaje and the contributions of his artistic and production staff – Rodrigo Quinto, Joey de Guzman, Romelito Rivera, Luther Guma, Lito Perez – deserve credit for this production of Journey to Damascus.
Aquino and Cavestany need to be crowned with laurels for a deeply moving performance.
The young students who watch the play may well heed the words of The Mother when she tells The Stranger, "You know what the children need to do when they have been bad – first, they say they’re sorry and ask to be forgiven – and then they make things right again."
Perchance they may be struck by a bolt from the blue – and follow the Apostle Paul – and Strindberg – on the road to Damascus.
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