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Scandinavian Theatre Off-Broadway (at West 116th Street):
A Decade of Staged Readings of Nordic Plays
from the Swedish Program at Columbia University

Presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of
the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study
at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, May 3, 2003

By Verne Moberg

Drama plays a major role in the cultural life of Scandinavia but is grossly underrepresented in English language translation onstage in America. (The possible exception to this is the case of Ibsen and Strindberg.) In Stockholm, for example, annual attendance figures show that about as many people go to the theatre there as in New York City (with a population about eight times greater). Yet, to the frustration of those teaching about Scandinavia, few dramas from that part of the world have been produced in the U.S. in English translation.

One reason for this may be the cost. To stage a Scandinavian play on Off Off Broadway one might well have to spend at least $15,000. To stage it Off Broadway, $30,000 is a realistic figure for a bare-bones production, and it could run well into six or seven figures. To stage a play on Broadway costs in the upper six figures, the sky being the limit. And, of course, advertising for both Broadway and Off Broadway is an enormous expense. For a teacher, this means that, “even in New York City,” there is very little chance of showing students theatre imported from Scandinavia (except for one Ingmar Bergman production a year brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, usually after the end of the spring semester). So what are the alternatives?

Not long after I began teaching Swedish language and Scandinavian literature at Columbia University, it occurred to me that New York City nevertheless offered some very special advantages as an educational environment. There is a saying that if God gives you lemons, you should make lemonade, and what we had in New York was a lot of unemployed actors (most of whom were by no means lemons!) and a great thirst for theatre. It seemed to me that this was a fine place to introduce Scandinavian theatre, even if only in a very basic way on campus. So together with Robert Greer, a student in Swedish and a freelance theatre director who loved Strindberg enough to try other writers, we at Columbia have been presenting staged readings of Scandinavian plays for over a decade now. Most of these Robert cast and directed; I translated and publicized them. Almost all the actors were professionals (e.g., members of Actors Equity Association), and as a result we have been bound by union rules for staged readings: the presentations are staged, but actors are still “on book” (with scripts still in hand), no more than fifteen hours of rehearsal are allowed, and tickets may not be sold (although donations are allowed); also, any actor who gets a better paying job someplace else is entitled to drop out, even at the last minute—which means that the director must have nerves of steel, a wide circle of actor friends, a lively imagination, and a special talent for herding cats.

Along with a special guest appearance by Stockholm’s Spegelteatern (doing Bakom Bifrost, Beyond the Rainbow, an imaginative replay of Norse mythology, done in Swedish with athletic fervor on September 17, 1993), we began with some readings of hitherto neglected nineteenth century authors including Anna Charlotte Leffler (Sanna kvinnor, True Women, in an old translation) and Laura Petersen Kieler (Män av ära, Men of Honor, in a translation I did with my student Diana Garcia). True Women, about the Married Women’s Property Act and the Double Standard Debate in Sweden in the 1880s, was rollicking fun and surprisingly modern, and we were invited to do it at a women’s history conference at Rutgers University, across the river in New Jersey. Men of Honor offered fewer laughs but no less timely social criticism. As you probably know, Laura Kieler, the model for Ibsen’s Nora, was not “just a housewife” but a family breadwinner and author of twenty-five books. This was her 1890 play about the dangers of “free love” and the disaster incurred by one woman who tried it.

Next on the agenda was an ongoing interest in Kristina Lugn, our first and most popular modern Scandinavian dramatist. Under Robert’s direction, we have now done readings of no less than seven of her plays in my translation, including Det vackra blir liksom över (The Hour of the Dog, 1991), Idla-flickorna (The Old Girls at Lake Garda, 1994, 1995); Tant Blomma (Aunt Blossom, 1994, 1995); Ruth och Ragnar (Ruth and Roger, 1998), Silver Star (1998); Nattorienterarna (The Night Walkers, 2000, 2001); and in 2002, Stulna juveler (Stolen Jewels).

The first of these readings, Hour of the Dog (based on Lugn’s poetry volume Hundstunden), was done first at Deutsches Haus and then in a showcase presentation at the Tribeca Theatre Lab in Manhattan in April 1993 and at the Edinburgh international (Fringe) theatre Festival August-September 1993. In the opinion of both director and translator, Hour of the Dog was remarkable for it freshness--in Sweden, in America, and in Edinburgh: Kristina Lugn was a new voice quite unlike any that had been heard before (or since). We certainly stand by that judgment today.

Lugn’s Tant Blomma (Aunt Blossom) was staged effectively, along with Idla-flickorna (The Gymnasts), by Equity Actors at Deutsches Haus on April 21 and 22,1993. Aunt Blossom continued to win friends: in 1997 my translation won the Inger Sjöberg Prize from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and was included in Modern Women Playwrights of Europe, an anthology edited by Alan Barr and published by Oxford University Press in 2001. An article I wrote about Lugn was published in the magazine Transformation in spring 2000.

Not long after 9/11, on October 13, 2001,I gave a talk about translating Kristina Lugn at the Swedish Teachers’ Workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the occasion Lugn asked me to include a translation of a monologue from her new play Stulna juveler: I got hooked, and on April 10, 2002, the Columbia Swedish Program presented a staged reading of the play (which had premiered at Dramaten’s Lilla Scenen in October 2000). This is a merrily wacky, witty farce about one Sylvia Plath Award-winning poet named Margo Adair St. Clair, who plans to marry her shrink. I translated the text, my songwriter friend Anne Seale did the songs by Matti Bye, and Robert directed again. This was a more ambitious project than those of previous years, as the play has seven characters and numerous musical interludes.

A definite highpoint in our theatre work over the decade was the Nordic Theatre Festival we presented September 7-10, 1995, at Minor Latham Playhouse of Barnard College, including showcase productions (i.e., “off book”) of seven plays by six playwrights from five Nordic countries on four days. The plays presented were Eg er meistarinn (I am the Maestro) by Hrafnhildur Hagalin Gudmundsdottir on September 7; Tant Blomma (Aunt Blossom) and Idla-flickorna (The Old Girls at Lake Garda) by Kristina Lugn on September 8; Santakujan Othello (The Othello of Sand Alley) by Eeva-Liisa Manner, and Jeg tæller timerne (I Count the Hours: A Monologue for a Sarajevo Woman) by Stig Dalager, both on September 9; Himmelplaneten (The Heavenly Planet) by Edvard Rønning and Reisen til Venezia (The Trip to Venice) by Bjørg Vik, both on September 10. The Nordic Theatre Festival was co-produced by Robert and me with our colleagues Austin and Ail Flint, thanks to a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Council of Nordic Ministers, SAS, and many other organizations. A copy of the program for the Nordic Theatre Festival is on display here.

One of the best things about the festival was meeting the various playwrights and guests from Scandinavia. An all-time low was the moment when the actor starring as Aunt Blossom demanded $200 in cash five minutes before curtain, or else he refused to go onstage. (We manage to wrastle up the dough, but our box office manager vowed that this was the end of her career in the theater.)

The house was sold out for four nights (September 7-10), introducing some 400 spectators to seven new dramas from Scandinavia. By our best estimate, about a hundred people were employed in producing the festival. And Stig Dalager’s play I Count the Hours moved on to an extended run at La Mama Theatre Club in New York.

The Nordic Theatre Festival exhilarated--and exhausted--us all, and there was another interesting spin-off. The Norwegian playwright Edvard Rønning came to see his play in the festival, and while visiting New York took the opportunity to look up some relatives in Brooklyn. The result was his drama entitled in my translation Bay Ridge (known in Norwegian as Brooklyn), and we staged a reading of this drama--about an encounter with a young Norwegian woman visiting her Brooklyn relatives--on November 13, 1998, at Barnard College’s Minor Latham Playhouse, across Broadway from Columbia.

Another high point in our drama careers at Columbia was a birthday party for my favorite Swedish author, Victoria Benedictsson.By the time the 150th anniversary of her birth rolled around, in spring 2000, it seemed just logical for us to try to do some Benedictsson dramas in English translation as staged readings at Columbia. So I looked about for funding and translated Den bergtagna (Spellbound) in the summer of 1999 and then in the fall also Teorier (Theories). The result was a two-day program entitled “Victoria Lives!” on March 10-11, 2000. It also included an excellent presentation of Benedictsson by her Swedish editor, Christina Sjöblad, and readings by three Swedish woman novelists writing today–Marie Hermanson, Elisabeth Rynell, and Anna-Karin Palm–as well as a Web site presenting information on Benedictsson, plus a number of translations (the plays but also the prose version of Den bergtagna, plus several short stories, a diary excerpts, and parts of the novel Pengar). Further information about the events and the site is included in the program, a copy of which is on display here along with a few photos of our actors from the two plays. A presentation of Benedictsson’s work is still featured on our Web site at www.columbia.edu/cu/swedish/vb/victorialives.html, where, as we say, “Victoria Lives!” online

Many wonderful things happened during these days, but there were some low moments: one distinguished literary critic walked out of Spellbound at the intermission because (I think) she hated the actress who played Louise. Also, we couldn’t use a tuba in Theories because the actor couldn’t carry a tuba and the script. But that’s show business, and on the whole it was a success. Best of all, fifteen to twenty of my students in Swedish language and literature classes had a chance to contribute their talents to this collective effort, demonstrating that language and literature learning can go hand in hand, producing results even on a practical level.

Later in the spring of 2000 I had the pleasure of attending the special commemorative program to celebrate Benedictsson at Lund University, organized by Christina Sjöblad. There I read a paper entitled “Deciphering Victoria’s Secret,” in which I recounted my own personal obsession with V.B. On that occasion I had the good fortune to see a performance by Irene Lindh of Cecilia Sidenbladh’s dramatic monologue entitled Isjungfrun (The Ice Maiden), based on Benedictsson’s diary Stora boken and recreating the story of her tragic love affair with Georg Brandes. My first impulse was to translate it, and I did. The following fall, on November 3, 2000, Robert directed a staged reading for us at Deutsches Haus. The talented actress Sybil Lines did an outstanding job of bringing Benedictsson to life in the reformulation by Cecilia Sidenbladh (a current-day Swedish writer dedicated to the re-creation of Swedish women’s history in drama). This reading was combined with a new translation of Strindberg’s Playing with Fire by Ulrika Brand on a double bill entitled “Fire and Ice.” The Ice Maiden recreated a great story, and Sybil and Robert were invited to do a two-week re-run in August 2002 at Stockholm’s Strindberg Museum. He had earlier directed two English versions of The Stronger there with the Stockholm Strindberg Festival, including one version in which Mademoiselle Y was replaced by Monsieur Y; it was a production that had originated at Deutsches Haus on April 22, 1999. We’re now hopeful that Sybil Lines will appear in The Ice Maiden in future productions in English on a Stockholm stage in the summertime.

At Deutsches Haus, our most recent foray into Scandinavian theatre was a reading of Margareta Garpe’s play Alla dagar, alla nätter (All the Days, All the Nights) on November 8, 2002. I can say without reservation that this was one of our best, thanks to a wonderful script, a careful translation (by Tana Ross and Paul Luskin, edited by me), excellent casting and direction by Robert, and some intelligent performances by the actors, especially Mary Keefe and Yvette Edelhart. The play shows how difficult family responsibilities become when both aging parents and coming-of-age children need help; the injustices involved in unequal inheritance; and the sacrifice that stands in the way of personal fulfillment and the pursuit of happiness. We see one woman’s struggle for emotional independence and artistic survival in the complex extended family networks of current-day Sweden. Robert’s says, “With this play Margareta Garpe brought a new outlook to a problem as old as organized society itself.” The author had wanted to attend the performance, but two of her daughters were about to give birth in Sweden, so her visit was postponed, and on March 11 this year she gave a talk for us on mother and daughter relationships in her plays.

Finally, I must add that this decade of theatre at Columbia would not have been possible but for the generous contributions of a long list of people: above all the authors and the actors, our audiences and loyal sponsors—especially the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Swedish Institute—and not least the office staff of our Department of Germanic Languages. We thank them all, once more today.

In accord with the rules and tradition of the Actors’ Equity Association, it was not possible to record these presentations at the time they were given, so our readings have been largely limited to one-time shows. However, Actors’ Equity rules on these matters recently changed, and now it is possible to record such works. So we would like to recreate the dramas (and some actors’ readings of poetry and fiction as well) in order to convert them into video- and audiotapes. Fundraising for this project, entitled “Scandinavia Off Broadway, on Campus at Columbia,” is now underway.

Once distributed, we believe, recordings of the plays we have done would help to make Nordic literature better known through English, in North America. The material would be useful in teaching Scandinavian literature in translation in comparative literature courses and also, of course, in foreign language courses, where students could also read the texts in the original languages. We would welcome your cooperation in aiding our efforts to reach out to the members of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study as well as to other academics.

What lessons can be learned from our presentations of these Scandinavian plays? This is a question Robert and I have discussed, and mostly we agree: “Trust the text.” As Robert puts it, “With a good text and good actors you can do no harm.”

“Is it possible to stage Scandinavian theatre projects like those at Columbia on other campuses?” I’ve asked Robert. Yes, he thinks so. “There's nothing to stop other campuses from doing it: the main question is whether they want to use students in their own department or to interest someone from the drama department to involve students majoring in acting (and perhaps a faculty member -- or grad. student – to direct). However, it may be difficult to interest drama departments since they only do a few of Ibsen's and even fewer of Strindberg's plays and more often read them in a graduate level or junior/senior year undergraduate course rather than perform them.”

The main thing, after all, is just to teach the text. Because Scandinavia has an abundant supply of good ones, and they deserve larger audiences abroad. Long live such literary globalization!