A lot to talk about

I saw Ibsen's Ghosts at BAM last night, starring the wonderful Lesley Manville. Three cell phones went off within the first 15 minutes, the girl next to me was incessantly thumbing the pages of her program, causing everyone in my row to give her dirty looks because of the distraction she was causing, and a doorknob fell off the set at a very inopportune moment (not that there's ever really a good moment for a set to start falling apart), causing a momentum-killing 15-second halt to the scene as an actor worked to reattach the handle to the door.  It was far from the most polite or easy-to-win-over audience I've seen (and a large number of audience members rudely made a dash for the doors as soon as the lights came up without applauding the curtain call), and yet, I don't think I've ever heard so many conversations about a show from the audience on their way out.

The first words I heard were a woman exclaiming to her friend that she didn't remember the show being so gripping (I would say "gripping" is an understatement for the last act of this production), and in addition to the dozen or so people I heard ask their friends what disease Oswald had ("worms in his brain? I don't get it. Why did he point down there?"), everyone seemed to be buzzing about it and asking their friends questions about what they'd seen. (Hopefully, for some of them their curiosity will lead them to the program notes detailing the fascinating reception Ibsen's play received at the time of its writing due to its taboo subject matters, including Oswald's syphilis.)  As I walked to the subway afterwards, all I heard were conversations about the show.... And my subway walk turned particularly long and meandering since I hadn't been to BAM in years, couldn't remember which direction I'd come from, had a dead cellphone, and mistakenly thought if I just followed the large groups of people, I'd find my subway stop.  I didn't find my subway line that way (though I found some other subway lines... and buses, and taxis, and a Caribbean restaurant), but I did get to hear lots of discussions and debates about the play -- not the usual "yeah, that actress was good" comments, but discussions about the themes of free love, guilt, duty, marriage, disease, euthanasia.... People had already moved beyond just the story on the stage and were using it as a launch-board to discuss its topics as they relate to the world today.

 

When I finally found my subway line and got on, two separate couples opposite me were engrossed in conversations about the show -- one debating whether Helene Alving had made the right choices, either in the past or in her action at the end of the show, and the other debating how much of Jacob Engstrand's "good Samaritan" acts actually came from the good of his heart, and whether his ulterior motives lessened the good of the deed.

Fifteen minutes into their conversations, when the two couples realized they were both talking about the same show, one of the women looked over at the other couple and with glittering eyes exclaimed, "Wasn't it wonderful?! There's a lot to talk about!"

Indeed.  The director comments in the program notes that during a period when the show was banned in England, a single unlicensed performance of it "detonated an explosion of critical venom."  Though today's audiences receive the play without the venom and shock it once met, the play clearly can still detonate an explosion of conversation.  And that, to me, is a mark of a truly successful show.