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The New In the winter of 1959, when Tyrone Guthrie arrived in the Twin Cities to scout locations for a new regional American theater, the thermometer stood at –30 degrees. As he later recalled it (rather theatrically) “you felt that a sharp, bright sword had pierced your bowels through and through.” What charmed him most about the Twin Cities on that frigid day were the serpentine gorges and lively sparkle of the Mississippi River. The cold weather notwithstanding, Guthrie and his colleagues eventually chose Minneapolis over Milwaukee and Detroit for his “Mid-American” theater—though it took another forty-five years for it to find its way to the river. The new and expanded Guthrie sits on its riverfront lot like a pile of enormous children's blocks—round or square or rectangular—its boxy crudeness enlivened by the intensity of its silo-blue sheath and yellow-tinted windows. It opened in June of 2006 with triple the floor space of the original building on Lowry Hill. Its three theaters, two restaurants, and six bars make it a perfect point of focus for a weekend getaway to the Twin Cities. The original plan had been to locate the main theater on the ground floor, but when Jean Nouvel, the project's Swiss-born architect, saw the site, he was adamant that the river view be a central part of the theatrical experience. As a result, the interior of the new Guthrie is a pleasant labyrinth of escalators, elevators, and stairways leading visitors to and from the lobbies, bars, and stages on the upper floors from which the nearby river becomes visible. The most prominent space on the main floor has been given over to the Guthrie's flagship restaurant, Cue. Cue's lofty ceilings, well-spaced tables and elegant furnishings make it a pleasant place to eat, and its curving glass walls increase the sense of spacious glamour. Casual visitors and those on a budget might be better off riding the longest escalator this side of the London Tube to Level Five Café, which offers a menu designed to assuage the anxiety of diners looking to enjoy a good meal without missing the show. The theater doors are no more than fifty yards down the hall. For those in a special rush, sandwiches and drinks are available at a deli right around the corner.
The new Guthrie has also been designed with lingerers in mind, however, and the restaurants, bars, and WiFi-equipped lobbies are open throughout the day, regardless of whether you have a ticket to a show. Of special interest is the cantilevered walkway extending out from the fifth-floor lobby toward the river like a twelve-story building lying on its side. This odd protuberance has been named “The Endless Bridge” though it clearly comes to an end at an outdoor terrace offering spectacular views of St. Anthony Falls, the Pillsbury A Mill, railroad magnate James J. Hill's famous Stone Arch Bridge (now a popular bike and pedestrian crossing), a lovely park, and the deepest lock on the entire Mississippi. Standing here, you can trace the entire history of white settlement in the Great Northwest with a turn of the head—or simply take in the beauty of the river, the buildings, and the trees. For theater buffs, of course, much of this is mere window-dressing. The Guthrie Theater is often referred to as America's premier regional theater, and its current artistic director, Irishman Joe Dowling, has successfully charted a course between work-horse classics, chestnuts of the modern Anglo-American repertoire, and thought-provoking contemporary works. A recent production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, in a controversial translation by local poet Robert Bly, touched several bases at once, with its neo-classic European origins, regional Norwegian-American flavor, and heavy undercurrents of contemporary myth and deep-psychology. At the other end of the mainstream spectrum, Irish playwright Alan Stanford's theatrical adaptation of the romance novel Jane Eyre has been popular enough to merit a revival. The tiny 200-seat Dowling Studio, meanwhile, is mounting 9 Parts of Desire, a solo work by Heather Raffo (based on the book by Geraldine Brooks) exploring the lives of modern Iraqi women. Throw in Gogol's The Government Inspector and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and you have a line-up with something for everyone.
I stopped in at the Guthrie on a cold bright Wednesday afternoon not long ago, and after plunking down my $20 for a rush-line seat in the seventh row, I spent a pleasant hour wandering around the place. It being a week-day matinee, I was not surprised to find that the Level Five Cafe was packed with septuagenarian couples enjoying white bean soup and mesquite-smoked turkey sandwiches. What did surprise me was that nearly all of them were wearing Scandinavian knit sweaters! One of the ushers later clued me in to the fact that many of these theater-goers had just stepped off a bus from somewhere in northern Minnesota on a Sons of Norway tour. Returning to the first floor, I found it filled with an entirely different type of visitor: noisy teenagers shouting and chasing one another around the lobby in their bulky parkas, as if they'd just found out they had not, in fact, signed up for a ski trip. Muttering a vain prayer that I would not find myself seated in the midst of these good-natured but boisterous folk, I eventually found my way to my seat. It turned out to be next to a quiet young woman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Reese Witherspoon. “You must be with a group of students,” I said, perhaps a little tactlessly, considering that she was sitting by herself. “I'm a student at St. Olaf,” she replied, seemingly unperturbed by my question. “I just came up for the day to see the play.” “Oh, so you're a theater major,” I blundered on. “Actually, it's for an ethics class,” she said. “I'm taking it for a distribution requirement.” “Ah, yes. I remember them.” I said. “In fact, when I came to the university, I was a math major. I decided to take care of a few of those distribution requirements...and ended up never taking a class in math. I might have ruined my career opportunities, but it's been an interesting life. In fact, I'm here writing an article for a Milwaukee newspaper.” “Oh, so you're a writer?” “Well, among other things. I've seen this play twice before. I'm curious to see what Robert Bly has made of it.” “I have to admit I've never heard of Robert Bly. Who is he?” “Local poet. Pretty famous.” I pointed to his picture, which happened to be exposed on the open page of the program in her lap. And at that point we both returned to our private thoughts. Peer Gynt is a strange play, which is why it's so seldom performed. The title character is a liar, a wastrel, and a ne'er-do-well, with a generous but drunkard father (now long dead) and an exasperated, nagging mother. He's a sort of anti-hero, though his character pales when placed beside the protagonists of Knut Hamsun novels like Pan or Mysteries. (But perhaps that merely reflects the sharpening of social alienation in Norway between the 1860s and the 1890s.) Peer is fond of drink and adept at flights of fancy that entertain people for the moment, though they also insure that no one will ever rely on him for anything important. At a wedding (to which he has not been invited) Peer wins the heart of a shy local girl named Solveig, but later in the evening runs off with the bride, who had locked herself in her room and refused to come out. As the first act comes to a close, Solveig follows Peer (who has been banished from the community due to his abduction of the bride-to-be) up into the mountain forests, and she offers to live with him. He's troubled by the idea—though he finds her the most adorable of all creatures—and, making a lame excuse, he flees.
At intermission I chatted with an usher about the fact that the escalators change direct depending on the traffic flow, and about the actor Mark Rylance, who plays Peer. I'd never heard of him, and was unaware of his stature as not only an actor, but also as the artistic director of the Globe Theater in London from 1995 to 2005. The usher mistook me for a theater buff and informed me proudly that she had seen the Guthrie's innaugural production of Hamlet, with George Grizzard in the title role, in 1963. The best I could muster in reply was S.S. Glencairn in 1967, and God only knows who was the star of that one. Returning to my seat, I could not resist commenting on the pair of Ugg sheepskin boots that my young neighbor was wearing. She seemed eager to continue our conversation, so I asked her if she was enjoying the play. She was. She politely returned the question, and I admitted that I too was enjoying the flow, the poetry, the fancy, the theatricity of it all. “There's one major problem with the play, however,” I remarked. “It all hinges on the fact that Solveig loves Peer, but it never gives us a good reason to believe that she really does love him, when everyone else ridicules him. What does she see that no one else can?” “You're right! Gee, I never thought of that.” During the second act, with its capitalism and trolls and Arabian dancing and shipwrecks, I began to notice that the gentleman to my right was laughing in peculiar places. Executive pony-tail notwithstanding, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Craig T. Nelson, the star of the long-running TV series Coach. When the play was over, and everyone was getting up to leave, I turned to him and said, “Excuse me, but are you an academic?” “Yes, actually I am,” he replied. “I could tell by the places where you laughed,” I said. “What do you teach?” “Literature and theology,” he said. “I had heard that the production was really ragged. I'm glad I waited until they'd smoothed a few things out.” “You know that last line, about the mother?” I said. “I wonder if that's in the original, or if that's just Bly talking,” I said. “Oh, there's Bly all over this work,” he said with a satisfied air. Yet it seems that Ibsen himself is responsible for this finale. A quick look a Wikipedia offers the following synopsis: Peer screams and calls [Solveig] mother, and hides himself in her lap. Solveig sings her lullaby for him, and we might presume he dies in this last scene of the play, although there are no stage directions or dialogue to indicate that he actually does. There are plenty of curious episodes in Peer Gynt, several of which involve an entity called "the great Borg" which is never adequately explained, and is rendered on stage, not entirely satisfactorily, by a bunch of helium balloons. Well, the play was originally written as a closet drama, to be read rather than staged. I left the theater feeling somewhat caught up in all dream-like imagery, and not worrying overmuch about what it was actually supposed to mean. Peer Gynt is pretty much of a wistful loser from start to finish, though he's a good story-teller. Perhaps there are enigmatic Solveig-like creatures hovering around to save the souls of such folk, though I suppose there is no rational way that we can explain or understand that, either. Maybe it all has to do with the mountain air and the cabin in the woods.... home / films / art / books / travel photos by Richard Sennott |
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