Strindberg’s “ruthless truthfulness is why people are put off by him,’’ Krasner says, but bleak as Strindberg could be, the thrice-married dramatist was also highly modern in his depiction of the battle between the sexes, and often very funny. His work was key to later playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee.
Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,’’ in particular, owes a debt to “Dance of Death,’’ says Krasner, but when it comes to relations between men and women, especially in marriage, “most of modern drama, and most modern soap operas, are straight out of Strindberg.’’
“His whole idea of sexual warfare and the battle between the sexes - few if any writers ever had their fingers on the pulse of such a dynamic of desire and hate, and with that, sparks just fly in his plays,’’ says Krasner. “He didn’t have much hope in the sexual warfare. I think that’s why he gets that gloomy mark on him, in that Ibsen had a little more hope. . . . Strindberg didn’t see much hope for anybody, men or women.’’
Krasner and Mara Radulovic, a part-time member of the Emerson faculty, are the leads in this tale of power games within a bitter union - roles Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren played in the drama’s most recent Broadway revival, in 2001.
“As Strindberg would say, we’re born discontented,’’ says Scott Fielding, who directs the reading. “He’s very much attuned to this question of why are we unhappy in life and how can we be happy? Can we be happy under our own power? What is the role of God?’’
Fielding, who is also the director of the Michael Chekhov Actors Studio Boston, says Strindberg was quite contemporary in the complex psychology of his characters, with a touch that prefigures the theater of the absurd and playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco.
