BWW Reviews: SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, Divorced From Emotions

Like much of the work of Belgian director Ivo van Hove that crashes onto these shores, Scenes From A Marriage is more about flashy theatrics than feeling any kind of emotion for the characters on stage.

Ingmar Bergman's 1973 television miniseries about the dissolving marriage of college professor Johan and lawyer Marianne was blamed for an upswing in Swedish divorces. With its half-hour intermission, van Hove's innovative, but ultimately dull adaptation may, at best, cause an upswing in traffic at the nearest coffee shop.

The audience is divided into three groups for the first act because New York Theatre Workshop's East 4th Street auditorium has been reconfigured into three smaller ones. Emily Mann's English adaptation of Bergman's teleplay calls for three pairs of actors to simultaneously play individual half-hour scenes in front of one third of the patrons. Audience members then move to a new location and the actors all play their scenes to a new house. A third go at it insures that everyone has seen all three scenes.

In one room, young Johan and Marianne (Alex Hurt and Susannah Flood) entertain a bickering couple (Erin Gann and Carmen Zilles) before cautiously discussing a life-changing moment in their lives. In another, slightly older Johan and Marianne (Dallas Roberts and Roslyn Ruff) try and piece together what they know is crumbling and in the third, the senior Marianne (Tina Benko) pathetically begs for her Johan (Arliss Howard) not to leave her after he says he's fallen in love with another woman.

The three spaces share a central backstage area, which is visible to the audience through windows, and louder moments from each scene are clearly heard by those trying to watch the others. Perhaps the point there is to have Johan and Marianne continually haunted by their past and future, but it's more of a distraction than an enhancement; especially when you're trying to watch a quiet moment but the intimacy is overwhelmed by the noise in the next room.

The triptych playhouse is replaced by in-the-round seating during intermission and yes, the second act begins with all three couples on stage simultaneously performing the sign-the-divorce-papers scene. The pairs vary in pacing and staging, adding much-needed textures, and things get heated up in more ways than one. After this showy climax, the remaining scenes seem superfluous.

Unfortunately, the quality of acting varies quite a bit among the ensemble members, but Benko does an outstanding job of playing Marianne as a wounded survivor who tries to keep her vulnerability safely hidden. Flood's animated energy as younger Marianne and Roberts' passionate masculinity are also worth noting.

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