Persona Non Grata

SOMETIMES AT THE Loeb Ex you get the feeling that all the pretense and profundity is gathering like rainclouds and that if one person in the audience giggled, the entire place, actors and all, would explode in laughter. A friend of mine who hates Ingmar Bergman says the same thing would be true of his films if the audience couldn't blame the stiffness of the dialogue on the subtitles. So a stage production of Persona, Bergman's 1966 film about the attempt of one woman, Elisabeth, to impose her identity upon another, Alma, starts out with two strikes against it.

But in practice, the audience is absorbed for an hour and a half, applauds the case sincerely and takes the play very seriously indeed. No one giggles. And there is no reason anyone should. Persona is a fine production, with two excellent actresses in the key roles (Maeve Kinkead and Sheira Freedman), a fine director (Sarah Stearns), a beautiful set, well-chosen music, and a throroughgoing professionalism.

There are good reasons why successful stage-plays are filmed--at the very least, they provide a record of a performance that would otherwise disappear. And cinematic techniques can be used to strengthen the impact of the play and increase its accessibility. But reversing the process is more difficult, because some means must be found to compensate for the forfeit of all the film techniques. The Loeb Persona doesn't try to make up for these lost ingredients, and is content to deal only with those bare bones of Bergman's film which did not depend on his camera. The hallmarks of the original Persona are gone without trace--Bergman's loving concentration on the faces of the two woman, his split-screen sequences, his reminders that Persona is a film and not reality, conveyed by shots which include his cameras, himself, and random footage from his earlier movies. Finally, he burns up the celluloid itself, on screen, to bring this home to his viewers.

Because these cinematic effects were central to Bergman's purpose, any stage adaptation is bound to convey only part of his message. When Elisabeth breaks into tears after looking at a picture of a Vietnamese monk setting himself afire, not everyone in the theatre can be sure just what she sees; when her husband arrives, all the ambiguity present in the encounter in the movie is lost.

The Loeb Persona can be best appreciated by those who have not seen the movie, and who can thus enjoy it on its own merits; those who do know the film will be left unsatisfied and perplexed, though not unsympathetic. Even when the director is Bergman, a man who has been accused of making films for people who think they ought to be reading books instead of going to the movies, what appears on screen is not easily transferred to the stage. Despite the formidable talents and energies of the Loeb production, everything that made Persona a great film instead of a mediocre stage play is lost in the translation.