Tower power

ART takes on The Master Builder

by Carolyn Clay

THE MASTER BUILDER, By Henrik Ibsen. Adapted by Robert Brustein. Directed by Kate Whoriskey. Set design by Christine Jones. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Sound by Christopher Walker. With Christopher McCann, Sharon Scruggs, Will LeBow, Jeremy Geidt, Benjamin Evett, Aysan Çelik, and Kristin Flanders. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through March 21.

Robert Brustein is no Halvard Solness. Unlike the title character of Ibsen's The Master Builder, who both covets and fears "the younger generation," the American Repertory Theatre honcho has entrusted his new adaptation of a play he reveres to a very young director. She's 28-year-old Kate Whoriskey, whose rendering of The Master Builder proves she has the sort of talent that would make old Halvard very nervous. What's more, she wasn't anywhere near the Loeb Drama Center in 1991, so she can't be accused of cribbing from Robert Wilson, whose mechanical yet haunting When We Dead Awaken her production recalls -- except that here the visionary at center stage is Ibsen rather than his interpreter.

The Master Builder, it must be said, is a sacred cow that's a bear to produce. One of Ibsen's late, poetic masterpieces, the 1892 drama is both a portrait of the artist as an old man and a marriage of Freudian symbolism to classical tragedy. In Brustein's taut if sometimes slang-marred adaptation, the play seems very much the story of a man brought down by hubris and desperate sexual striving, with a soupçon of the death wish. Christopher McCann's razor-thin, ponytailed Solness is a diabolical if pained protagonist whose dream of burying his protractor in Hilde Wangel's duffel never seems on a par with his dark-grained fear and self-loathing. As for the play's near-impossible climax, Whoriskey brings it off in a coup of lighting, slo-mo, and looming silhouette that would be quite effective if we could not see the crashed master builder, under insufficient cover of darkness, sneaking off stage right.

Elsewhere the director's vision, abetted by a crack team of designers, is spooky and striking -- with Kristin Flanders's brash Hilde plopped into the middle of it like some Alpine meringue in a pan of ash. Master-builder Solness's house -- hardly a "home for people," as he describes the wares of his successful middle years -- is a black-swirled canvas punctuated by shapes painted in light. In one compartment, apprentice Ragnar Brovik robotically drafts as his moribund father, Knut, draws amplified, labored breaths. In a bright-lit cube, bookkeeper Kaja Fosli intones numbers. And Solness's apprehensive wife, Aline, occupies a cell the shape of a door frame, in which she either hovers on high or is lowered to the stage. The master builder may be ruler of this domain, but it is an arid, isolating one -- not just for him but for the people under his thumb.

Like Ibsen, Solness suffers from the conviction that his artistic success has come at the price of his own happiness and that of others. A king-of-the-hill contractor, he's a one-time builder of towered churches who has repudiated God and turned to building houses he intends as shrines to the happy home life that has eluded him and Aline since the house fire that both sparked his career and led to the death of the couple's baby sons. Moreover, Solness, a great believer in his own inner demon, thinks he has somehow willed the events of his life. Still, he has premonitions of his artistic end. The young, symbolized by Ragnar, "are retribution, an army of change under a new banner."

Down from the mountains comes Hilde Wangel, a predatory bird of a twentysomething spurred by Ibsen's own flirtations with younger women, in particular with an 18-year-old named Emilie Bardach -- who was, by all accounts, not the fresh-air-breathing temptress to fate into which Ibsen turned her. In the play, however, Hilde, who once witnessed the now vertiginous Solness's climb to the top of a church tower and developed an adolescent crush, challenges him to do it again. In a shared fantasy that beams more phallic symbolism than the black spire that dominates ART's third act, the two dream of constructing "castles in the air" whose heights will thrill rather than fright them. "Thrilling," in fact, is the operative word for Hilde, who even manages to get a charge from her manipulations' disastrous result.

At the ART, Flanders, whose zippy boldness is almost stylized, conspires with Brustein's distinctly modern adaptation to create a Hilde who's a bit too flip. And McCann does not tower as Solness; rather, his power is sinewy and wolfish. He is compelling, though -- and Whoriskey's movement patterns underline this. Except for Flanders's pert child vixen of a Hilde, the other characters all move as if Solness were either drawing or repelling them. And Sharon Scruggs's Aline is quite moving -- not the begrudging prune she can seem but the drawn, faded beauty Ibsen describes.

Brustein has trimmed some of The Master Builder's religiosity: its theme that man dare not attempt a castle so high it looks down on churches. And certainly the play can be seen as the tragedy of a man brought low by ego and a strange young woman pushing psychological Viagra. But as the ART production moves from the harsh house to a desiccated garden to the bleak outdoors of act three, the characters' period clothing lightens up. Black gives way to white. Solness, before he topples, flings his arms out in a Christ-like pose. Hilde, after a moment of hesitation, finds glory in his climb. In the end, Whoriskey conjures an image in which there is terror but also, quite possibly, salvation.