Seattle PI's Review of Ghost Sonata

Reviewed by Joe Adcock

The Ghost Sonata

"The Ghost Sonata," a 1907 orgy of anguish by the Swedish master of dramatic discomfort August Strindberg, raises the question of just who is being haunted.

Most of the 14 characters have guilty secrets. A self-appointed prosecutor delights in putting his associates to shame. And why all the delight? Why it's just like in the introduction to psychology textbooks. The shamer has a super-shameful secret of his own. As long as he keeps pointing the finger, his victims will be too flustered to do any finger pointing of their own.

Then along comes an innocent, a young student. He is altruistic. He comported himself heroically as a volunteer rescuer when he saw a terrible fire. It is he who gets to point the final, unimpeachable finger. Alas, the girl he has been courting is too debilitated by her family's hypocrisy, suffering and penance to muster enough animal vitality to run off with him and be happy.

Open Circle Theater's production of "Ghost Sonata," directed by Andy Justus, is appropriately eerie, with actors scattered all over the sanctuary of All Pilgrims Church. The building's high arches and dome make for spooky resonances. Unfortunately those resonances sometimes muffle Strindberg's ornate rhetoric. And the flat seating area, with rows of pews, makes for problematic sight lines.

By 1907, Strindberg was through with anything resembling realism. "Ghost Sonata" is determinedly weird and disjointed, full of symbolism and sudden outbursts of extreme emotion.

Justus' actors do well with the weirdness. They work out multiple variations on the theme of distress. Particularly strong is Aaron Allshouse as the fiendish prosecutor. He is sinister when being seductively friendly and helpless. He is diabolical when he gets out of his wheelchair and, two canes flailing, starts indicting right and left.

As the student, Andrew Perez is suitably shocked. The student (like the audience) eventually becomes exasperated with the creepy venality steadily disclosed during the course of 90 minutes. The student then becomes the prosecutor. Perez wades through some of Strindberg's windiest tirades -- tough going for all concerned, but that's the way it goes in this play, with its ever increasingly cyclonic atmosphere.

As for who is actually being haunted in "Sonata," the answer is everyone involved, but most particularly the playwright himself. Though he denounced Sweden's Victorian Lutheranism, Strindberg clearly was haunted by all that dogma about original and unoriginal sin.

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