THE MASTER BUILDER

Directed by Kate Whoriskey

At the A.R.T.

Through Mar. 21

When the American Repertory Theatre puts up a show, whether it's Peter Pan or Bertolt Brecht, every scene feels like an existential dialogue in the dark. It's partly a function of the Loeb Mainstage itself and partly a function of A.R.T. sets which are too conceptual to bother setting the right time-of-day tone. This darkening affect is only a part of an A.R.T "feel" that touches almost every show they produce, and their most recent, Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, is no exception.

Opening on a scene set in an architectural workshop that actually looks more like an aquarium or a behavioral biology lab, The Master Builder encapsulates its actors in boxes and makes them stand on benches or platforms. By the time the master builder himself, Halvard Solness (played by Christopher McCann), comes on stage, the production has made such an obscurely penetrating impression on the audience that McCann takes the opportunity to give the unfolding plot both personality and plausability. He sits and bitches through scenes, denying the younger generation that wants to come into its own while he guiltily broods on hisown climb to success. Master builder Solness' wife, played by Sharon Scruggs, successfully brings his overwhelming, depressing perspective into relief, showing her more personable side only away from his presence. Solness believes thathe has willed all his luck, but when we see that he does not even understand his own wife, the young visitor Hilde Wangel, spunkily played by Kristin Flanders, becomes the cipher through which the audience understands the play. Hilde is young and sensible, pretty and plucky (Solness enunciates "Hilde" like a connoisseur of youth)--without her coloring, The Master Builder could easily be a bore, weighing down our attentions and our spirits. The Master Builder, a relatively short play, comes to its climax when Solness climbs the tower of what will be his last building.

Egged on by Hilde he overcomes his fear of hights in a gesture of self-reviving hubris as a stagelight casts an almost messianic shadow on the back of the stage. Set and lighting, in fact, hold Ibsen's character-oriented play to a high-wire of beauty. Piping classical music brings out a gracile quatro of stage hands between acts one and two: They lay out light-cobalt platforms which in turn absorb a dull, icy lighting scheme. As the A.R.T.'s actors quickly sketch their tragedy (an uber-fable about ambition and hubricguilt), its stagecraft is relentlessly Scandinavian, so that the dark, philosophically neurotic A.R.T. paradigm feels like nothing more than atypical (or stereotypical) Norwegian aesthetic.

Robert Brustein's adaptation of Ibsen's writing skids between the deconstructive (he has the master builder claim that he builds "machines for living") and the pedestrian, furthering the productions stance as a dark fable of universal applicability. At times the story of the master builder, at a zenith of reputation and skills, seems to mirror Brustein's own career, except that Brustein "climbs the steeple" with nearly every production. The Master Builder climbs up an icy ladder; it doesn't fall.