John Gabriel Borkman

This afternoon I saw Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at BAM. It starred Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Lindsay Duncan, and all the performances were powerful, sturdy, riveting.

The plays is about rigid, unrelenting emotional standoffs in a family. Borkman (Rickman) and his wife live estranged on separate floors in their home, disgraced because he was a high profile and imprisoned embezzler who lost the family's fortune and name. Fiona Shaw plays his wife, who is depressingly and maniacally obsessed with their son, and the drama centers around a visit from her sister Ella (Duncan), who had been Borkman's lover many years before, and who wants the son to choose her over his own mother.

It is about greed and vanity killing love. The characters are all so bruised and angry (except for the youths, who escape the fate of the adults' bitter heartlessness), and each just seems to pound away at a small handful of emotions. The actors did a great job, but there was so little transformation or resolution that the overall effect was a bit empty and two dimensional -- which is actually kind of the point of the play, that bitterness and lovelessness is crippling.