Love's Comedy

Act One: Boy seeks girl, is rejected. Act Two: Girl seeks boy, is accepted. Act Three: They part. Such is the basis of Love's Comedy by Henrik Ibsen, the 50th anniversary of whose death the Tufts Arena commemorates in this sixth and final production of its current season.

The outline would perhaps suggest a tragedy. Yet Ibsen's title is well chosen, and the play even has a happy ending for everyone. Contrary to the consensus, there was much humor in Ibsen himself and in his plays, though in the latter it resulted more from comic characters than from comic situations. Still, hearty laughter is absent; and disturbing arriere-pensees always lurk in the offing.

Love's Comedy is Ibsen's first major achievement (1862). This production is its New England and, apparently, its American premiere. In this rhymed-verse drama Ibsen, forsaking all his chauvinistic trumpeting, deals for the first time with "social problems," a concern on which his reputation largely rests. Specifically, it is a satire on love, courtship and marriage. It supports the thesis that a happy marriage demands the absence of love and that a lasting love exists only extramaritally; and it presents, through the mouth of the merchant Guldstad, a strong argument for mariages de convenance.

This attitude towards conventional society was here mixed with a large does of Kierkegaardian philosophy, which drew clear demarcations between the religious, ethical, and aesthetic types of human being--rated from top down--and advocated marriage only for the ethical.

This philosophy, as a matter of fact, was responsible for much of Ibsen's self-doubt. If Kierkegaard was right, then Ibsen as an aesthetic artist was destined to stay in the inferior class. I daresay that his auspicious shift to the "problem play" owed a great deal to his conviction that in this way he would be performing social and ethical acts, which would raise him on Kierkegaard's ladder of human worth.

Love's Comedy originally engendered violent outbursts of indignation. And no small part of it was aimed at Ibsen for daring to bring a clergyman on stage. But Ibsen went still further and made him the butt of satire, epitomized by the fact that the pastor has twelve children, eight of whom troop back and forth through the set--all of them girls--and his wife is again pregnant (and will doubtless present him with a thirteenth girl).

This pioneering work, which profoundly influenced Bernard Shaw's Getting Married and Candida, is not a great one. There is virtually no action; and the characters are on the whole rather two-dimensional. The entrances and exits are handled somewhat awkwardly; and the play's focus is not consistently clear. Ibsen had not yet reached that lofty fin-de-siecle peak that only Strindberg would eventually share with him. Nevertheless, no other play of Ibsen has so much sparkle and wit as Love's Comedy.

Structurally, the influence of light opera is apparent. Each act deals first with the peripheral characters and builds up to a big duet between Falk and Svanhild, the hero and heroine, with occasional arias for the hero (such as the celebrated tirade against tea). And each act even sports a men's chorus.

Director Marston Balch has solved the set problem resourcefully. He divided the oval acting arena into two parts. On one he built a platform to represent a villa porch, to which a row of suspended colored lanterns contributed much. Steps led down to the other part, which served as the garden. Beyond this, in the space usually belonging to the entranceway, he removed a portion of the wall and built another platformed area to function as a garden kiosk.

As to the acting, I feel compelled to report that there was much more flubbing of lines than charity can allow on an opening night. The cast could thus not put across all the crackling wit and fanciful poetry that lie in the script.

Lake Bobbitt, however, did a fine job as the poet Falk. He conveyed the proper frankness, independent courage, and dislike of fence-sitting. He had precise diction and always reacted to what others were saying around him, virtues which others in the cast might well emulate. Bobbitt would seem to be the most accomplished member of this summer's company, though he is not in a class with Lewis Palter, the star of Tuft's 1955 season. He still should work to eliminate his occasional stiffness of body or limbs.

Joyce White's Svanhild was too reginal and cold to elicit sufficiently ardent passion to make her choose between a temporary lover and a permanent husband; but she has a pleasing voice. She should learn to control her unconscious mannerism of underlining important words with little negative twitches of the head. As her sister, Anna Hunt was colorless; her voice, though musical, lacked conviction. Their mother, as played by Jen Karabel, needed force; her mezzo-piano voice was not up to the two fortissimo outbursts demanded of her.

Richard Duprey, as the divinity student Lind who is dissuaded from following his deeply-felt mission in life, had all he could do to stumble through his lines. James Ruberti and Ralph Hoffmann, as the wholesaler Guldstad and law-clerk Stiver, made poor starts but improved greatly by their big scenes in the third act. Donald McAllister, who played Paster Strawman, has a serious diction problem. He must get rid of his awful accent, and can start by watching his vowels and sibilants.

As the season comes to a close, perhaps two general words of advice to the cast might be in order. First, try to round out your role, be it large or small. That a playwright has written only a cardboard character into his lines is no excuse; it is then up to the director or the actor to invent something. This is especially true of small parts, on which the dramatist is likely to have spent little pains. Jacquelyn Zollo's Miss Jay is a good example; she was on stage only briefly and had but a handful of lines, yet achieved warmth and depth. I felt she was a whole person, whom I could describe at some length if need be.

Second, remember that good acting doesn't end when lines end. There is more to it than delivering speeches flawlessly and then just waiting, like Pygmalion's statue, for Aphrodite to give the cue to speak again. You must act from the moment you appear on stage until you exit. This is what Bobbit has mastered; he is always acting, interacting and reacting, whether he is speaking or not. On Tuesday night I even noted several members of the cast starting up conversation before they had exited beyond reach of eye and ear; this is not professional theatre. You must assume that, at every moment, someone is watching you; and it may be Big Brother.