| FALL
2000 EVENTS |
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Fall 2000 Events sponsored by the
Swedish Program and scheduled for Deutsches Haus, 420 West 116th Street,
at Columbia University in New York City.
November 3, 2000
FIRE AND ICE
Stories of love and betrayal revealing the turbulent lives of two prominent
19th century Swedish writers, August Strindberg and Victoria Benedictsson,
will be the focus of an evening Friday, November 3, at Columbia University.
The Swedish Program will present staged readings of new translations of
two one-act plays: "Playing With Fire" by Strindberg, translated and directed
by Ulrika Brand, and "The Ice Maiden," by Cecilia Sidenbladh, based on
the diaries of Victoria Benedictsson, translated by Verne Moberg and directed
by Robert Greer.
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| To be presented for the first
time outside Sweden, "The Ice Maiden" has previously been performed at Stadsteatern
in Stockholm, Sweden. The play provides an intimate look at a woman struggling
to establish her literary worth as part of the first generation of professional
women writers, and to bridge a bourgeois lifestyle with the bohemian culture
of free love she encountered. |
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Victoria Benedictsson (1850-88)
is sometimes called Sweden's George Eliot. Her love affair with Europe's
top literary critic Georg Brandes and his rejection of her and devaluation
of her writing talent are the subject of "The Ice Maiden," which is based
on diaries she kept. Cecilia Sidenbladh, author of "The Ice Maiden," is
a contemporary Swedish playwright and novelist whose dramatic works are
based on historical subject matter and the novels of Carl Johan Love Almquist.
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| "Playing With Fire," a darkly
comic play, was written in 1892, the year that August Strindberg's marriage
to his first wife Siri von Essen was dissolved. The primary love triangle
in the play closely parallels the early stages of the relationship formed
between Strindberg, Siri and Siri's first husband, Baron Carl Gustaf Wrangel.
For Strindberg (1849-1912), the battle of the sexes provided his most consistent
and charged subject matter. His masterpiece "The Dance of Death" (1900)
is considered the model for Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," and
his influence as a playwright extended to Eugene O'Neill and Harold Pinter,
among many others. |
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A writer who produced at
a breathtaking rate (more than 60 plays, in addition to novels, essays,
and historical works), Strindberg started out as a radical thinker professing
sympathy for women's causes. As his relationship with von Essen degenerated,
his attitudes towards women becameincreasingly adversarial.
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