On The Radar: Pelican

“Pelican.” Thursday, March 16-Saturday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Mar. 19 at 2:30 p.m. Loeb Experimental Theatre. Tickets available through the Harvard Box Office, (617) 495-2222. Free.

When Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s “The Isle of the Dead”—which forms half of this week’s Loeb Ex production—premiered in Sweden in 1907, it made a name for itself in only one way: as a tremendous failure. The play, which flopped, has rarely been performed in the almost 100 years since, and it has never before been seen by American audiences.

Yet HRDC veteran director Rowan W. Dorin ’07 has chosen “The Isle of the Dead,” as well as another relatively unknown Strindberg play, “The Pelican,” to form the basis of the adaptation that premiered in the Loeb Ex last night.

Not only has Dorin adapted and shortened the two plays in order to fuse them together into the 80-minute“Pelican”—spending six months reading about Strindberg and perusing his work—but he has also retranslated them from the original Swedish with the help of Harvard Scandinavian Club president Maria E. Troein ’07. Strindberg, a contemporary of Ibsen, has long been written off as an insignificant playwright by English speakers mainly due to the sloppy translations of his plays.

Associate Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) Gideon Lester was so impressed by Dorin’s aspirations that he asked to become the play’s advisor, a flattering request from someone already so highly situated in professional theatre.

The drama is also the first collaboration between the Athena Drama Company, a Harvard theater company devoted to women’s theater and creating a women’s theater community, and HRDC.

Though Dorin has worked with Athena’s director Rebecca L. Eshbaugh ’07 on five or six different plays including last spring’s “Three Tall Women,” “Pelican” marks their first official collaboration, one that is especially appropriate because of the play’s fascinating female roles. Eshbaugh explains, “This is a play about the family and the family gone wrong. It deals with the issue of the mother and the mother gone wrong.”

“Pelican”—a disturbing story about a mother who abuses her children—includes difficult subjects like matricide and incest. The audience surrounds the stage on all sides, according to co-producer Xienwei Ngiam ’07, to heighten the sense of emotional dead-end in which the characters find themselves.

Actress Laurel T. Holland ’06 explains that for her role as the plain and abused daughter, Gerda, “Rowan invested a lot of faith in me beyond the persona of what Laurel Holland appears to be. It is harder to play the roles that are more pained, and it is easier to play the ostentatious roles,” she says.

Despite these themes, preparations for the play have been filled with excitement. Many members of the cast even sport matching “Pelican” team t-shirts as they rehearse.

“This is the best show that they’ve done in this theatre all year,” raves tech crew member Courtney E. Thompson ’09. “You look at the cast and not one person is unfit for their role. You can see the actors lose themselves in their roles. That is what theater is all about.”