Photo by Bobae Kim
The Scandinavian American Theater Company (SATC) is a new project with the mission to bring Scandinavian theatre to the US. The founders are ex-pats, the playwrights and directors borrowed Scandinavians.
Their American premiere is a production of a play by Andreas Garfield, Home Sweet Home. In this play, a young couple have (has?) a friend to dinner, the fellow’s old army buddy (his name is Carsten). He’s just returned from Iraq (the Danes fought in Iraq with the “American-led coalition”). It’s a vivid portrait of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Carsten gradually reveals the effects that his experiences have had on him. In the process, he exposes the fatuous smugness of his hosts’ domesticity.
Iben, the woman (her name is Iben), is a dove (in 60's jargon), and she’s tactless enough to speak her mind. At one level, the play is a discussion of the war, or, more precisely, of the polarized opinions of the war. The dialogue could be about any war. One point of mounting the Danish production here is that it translates literally into the American experience. It succeeds in being simultaneously specific and universal.
Iben’s candidness naturally sets off a breakdown on the part of the soldier-guest (Carsten). The actor playing him has a Danish accent, while the other two do not, and it stresses the guest’s being the other. He ultimately drops the courtesy and explodes, attacking their attitudes and experiences. At its deepest level, the script discusses the complacency of comfort.
And so the play works on several levels. But its structure is flawed. It develops in fits and starts, its arc intermittently broken. Instead of progressing steadily toward its fate, it stalls and then jumps ahead as if to compensate. It goes off on an inexplicable tangent when Iben and Carsten flirt with each other. They may be doing it to tease her husband, but the have no reason to. Indeed, they dislike each other.
Christopher Berdal’s direction is crystalline. By the same token, it’s too pointed, sans subtlety. The acting is committed and often very effective, but generalized: we don’t see that the characters have a history together. The set is very nice, the walls defined by identical cardboard boxes (the pair is moving into the new house); we do indeed believe there are rooms behind them.
One of these rooms is the bathroom, to which Carsten withdraws on occasion. His solitary scenes back there are projected on to the wall of boxes. I never find this sort of media-rich production satisfying. Something in the play wants to be a movie.
And so we wish luck for the SATC. Its promise outweighs it flaws, and we’re looking forward to more work from them.
