Survival Test

By Melvin Maddocks

Launching a new repertory company with Strindberg is a little like christening a ship with a bottle of cyanide. As if founding a repertory company these days were not enough of an act of courage! Just to increase the odds, the Massachusetts Center Repertory Company has chosen for its first production one of this most melancholy Swede's most dolorous plays, The Dance of Death.

Can the resilience of Colleen Dewhurst and the stoicism of Ben Gazzara cope with the killing pressure of acting out that marriage made in hell known as the Strindberg couple? This is the ultimate drama within the drama on the stage of Boston's Shubert Theater.

What a pair of demons Strindberg has mated here. An embittered captain of Swedish artillery and his frustrated wife, a former actress, are serving out time on a rock-pile island outpost. As their 25th anniversary approaches, they have perfected the purest hatred for each other. Like the most passionately obsessed lovers, they live in a universe where nobody else exists. The only other character in the play, the wife's cousin, who introduced them, serves merely as a catalyst to their anti-chemistry.

When Strindberg in all his intensity works, he devastates an audience. When he does not, he devastates the actors. Dewhurst and Gazzara auditioned for The Dance of Death by playing together in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but Edward Albee is to August Strindberg what bitter lemon is to vitriol. Uncharacteristically subdued, the stars struggle with the play as if remembering the lines and holding on to sanity required all their energy. One of the curses of guest-star repertory is insufficient rehearsal time for difficult plays.

Pols and Nabobs. On the other hand, one of the blessings of repertory is the second chance. And the third chance. In May, two more big-name migratory workers, Jose Ferrer and Kate Reid, will come to the Shubert in Long Day's Journey into Night, to be followed by Eva Marie Saint and Fritz Weaver in Candida. Recalling that he was a charter member of earlier Greater Boston repertory companies--the Group 20 Players of Wellesley and the Cambridge Drama Festival--Weaver now jokes about writing a book called Festivals I Have Opened and Closed.

Still, repertory is an idea whose time may have come to Boston. Led by Janice Cashell, 32, an actress-director-teacher from Florida, the Massachusetts Center Repertory managed not only to raise $250,000 before the first-night curtain went up but also to gather together on its board of directors city hall politicians and Beacon Hill nabobs, to say nothing of Helen Hayes and Mrs. Curt Gowdy. Any group that can accomplish either of these feats ought to be able to survive Strindberg. Melvin Maddocks

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