Word: strindbergism
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...anyone had asked August Strindberg for his definition of hell, he would have given an implacable and desolated one-word answer-women. Or perhaps, wives...
...Strindberg, of course, means us to view the wife as the catalytic agent in both men's pain and disaster...
...Creditors, which is being given a potent revival at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in Manhattan, Strindberg returns to this broody theme but with traces of self-mocking humor and shy tendrils of affection that lighten his customarily Stygian mood...
What comes through is something larger than that. There is a general sense of ominous guilt and the specific, fatalistic conviction that an individual can only choose between crippling dependency or terrifying isolation. It is a mea sure of Strindberg's enduring power as a dramatist that he can inflict upon his characters and upon us the abnormal tensions he felt himself. The night closes in like an unrelenting vise until only the nightmare remains...
John Heard, as the second husband, is an appealingly stingless jellyfish. Despite her slightly mannered delivery of certain lines, Geraldine Page is a co quettish flirt while remaining a sexual feline with unretracted claws. Rip Torn has an affinity for Strindberg; he drinks up his part as if it were hemlock with a sprig of mint. A frequently underestimated actor, Torn exudes a combustible sense of imminent danger that makes him one of the most powerful presences on the U.S. stage...