I guess Nature took offense to my last column—the frozen specimen that once frosted my hair has since melted into a lovely pool of shit-mud-water-shit beneath my feet. I’m not complaining. At least I can make angels in the shitty sludge.
Speaking of angels…this weekend is big for theater. One of this semester’s two Theater Department productions is going up. All performances are sold out, so I suggest you find some kind soul with an extra ticket and offer them your heart. Or kidney. Or make them a diarrhea-angel.
This week: Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” directed by Assistant Professor of Theater Yuriy Kordonskiy.
“The play is immense,” Kordonskiy says, referring to Ibsen’s epic original text of “Peer Gynt”, which was written in five acts without the specific intention of being performed for an audience. Kordonskiy believed that performing the original script was unrealistic—a hypothetical production might last five hours long. So, in order to trim the length of the massive play, Kordonskiy and dramaturg Gedney Barclay ’09 carefully cut several scenes, some characters, and the whole fourth act. Content with a subplot-free script, Kordonskiy and his cast set about telling their version of Ibsen’s story.
Settling on a translation proved a laborious process. Sifting through a total of seven or eight versions of Ibsen’s text, Kordonskiy lead his cast sentence by sentence through the script, comparing each edition word for word. This experiment resulted in a collage of translations, a script developed by the cast and director that most effectively expressed the story intended by the author.
Peer Gynt is one of Ibsen’s earliest plays—predating the prolific work of his Golden Age (his period of social realism, including “A Doll’s House,” “Hedda Gabler,” “The Master Builder,” etc.). Unlike these more recent scripts, “Peer Gynt” follows some of the traditions of German romanticism. Ibsen fills the text with moments of magic, fantasy, imagination, and nightmare. This play, in particular, resonates with the personal life of the author, whose affair and exile are partially reflected within the story.
Indeed, as Ibsen writes a play about a man searching for himself, he seems to be exploring his own identity. This opportunity to examine one’s own being through performance is considered by Kordonskiy to be the show’s most exciting possibility, a potential for self-awareness that has informed his rehearsal process. For Kordonskiy, “Peer Gynt” gives both student actors and student audience a chance to experience a “projected biography,” to witness the ongoing efforts of one man searching for the core of his identity, and to perhaps experience moments of objectivity over the course of one’s own life.
Kordonskiy, who has received much acclaim and many awards for his significant theatrical work around the world (including an award from the Romanian Ministry of Culture), is constantly balancing his work in the professional world with his work at Wesleyan. No matter what illustrious work he maintains outside of the University, he is always refreshed to work with students. “These are students,” he remarks, referring to his diverse group of student actors, “some not even theater majors, doing this because they love it—it’s beautiful.”
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