Playwright: Laurence Bryan, after Bergman. At: National Pastime Theater, 4139 N. Broadway. Phone: 773-327-7077; $25
Runs through: Dec. 15
It's common to turn a movie into a play, and vice versa. In 1947 the great Swedish theater and cinema imagist Ingmar Bergman created The Magician as a live theater production, and then turned it into a film some years later. Now National Pastime and Clock Productions have re-adapted Bergman's film for the stage in an ambitious homage to a master recognized for his intellectual and spiritual complexity. Transcribing his work cannot be easy, yet the company pulls off The Magician with style and atmosphere. Still, something is missing—and I know what it is.
A successful Broadway and Hollywood author I know—you'd recognize his work at once—often told budding writers that a playwright's first tool is the spoken word, but in film the spoken word is a writer's last tool. In the film version of The Magician, the camera work, the moody lighting and the shadows took the place of much that otherwise would need to have been spoken out loud and explained. Movement and framing became characters themselves, perhaps suggesting more than they actually stated but nonetheless enriching both emotion and action. Much of that—too much of that—is missing in this stage adaptation despite suitable costuming, simple but effective scenic designs and excellent physical work. Adapter and director Laurence Bryan, respectful of his great source, has not attempted to fill out empty spaces with more dialog or action. Indeed, his license to adapt the work might have forbidden him to add or change anything.
Set in 1846 Sweden, the story focuses on traveling players who combine a magic lantern show and the sale of potions with magic tricks and mesmerism ( hypnosis ) thereby suggesting they can effect medical cures. They are invited to appear before a wealthy aristocrat and his wife, whose child recently has died. On arrival, they are demeaned and threatened as frauds by the local medical and police authorities. However, Bergman being Bergman, there is pointed social commentary plus twists, both sexual and supernatural, and even a political deus ex machina.
What's missing is character exposition, especially with regard to the aristocrat and his wife. They and their dead child very much are central, yet we learn virtually nothing about their motivations even as they behave in downright creepy ways. The bravado of film sweeps much before it, with editing rhythms and the occasional close-up focus the stage simply cannot provide. What the stage needs is more of the first tool of the playwright: words.
This is not to demean the effort made here, or its achievement in creating a moody and mysterious work leavened with comedy. It is to say, however, that this Magician is not as complete an experience—perhaps cannot be as complete—as its cinema parent.
