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The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen

nytheatre.com review by George Hunka
August 15, 2005

For those of you out there who consider the idea of watching another revival of a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen approximately as exciting as the idea of watching paint dry, I have good news and bad news.First the good news: Chicago’s troupe The Neo-Futurists, led this time around by deviser, director, translator and adapter Greg Allen, are back in town for another Fringe festival, and this time they’ve brought The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen, a fast-paced, wildly comedic, two-hour tour through the entire canon of the father of realism. And I mean the entire canon. While Ibsen is best known for the 12 prose plays that constitute his greatest achievement, it’s often forgotten that he wrote 14 plays before that. Some of them were real clunkers, too: nobody’s going to be reviving nationalist epics like Lady Inger of Oestraat any time soon. (The troupe gets around the inevitable challenge of not boring the audience to tears with, well, “innovative” stagings—like an all-kitchen-condiment version of The Feast at Solhaug.)But the group really comes into its own in the second half of the show, when it turns its attention to the plays on which Ibsen’s reputation rests. Some of them—An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder—get the comeuppance they so richly deserve, but it’s the great achievement of the show that, as the evening continues, the group manages to find the poetic elements in the elegiac last plays like Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and especially Ibsen’s farewell to the stage, When We Dead Awaken. While they don’t drop the almost manic intensity such a project seems to invite, the performers manage to sensitively pass along their respect for Ibsen’s genius. There are more than a few quiet moments, and all of them are earned.It would be unfair of me to single out any of the fine performers here, all of them in multiple roles, and also unfair if I didn’t list them: so all hail to Sarah Clark, Dina Connolly (boy, can that girl seethe), Joe Dempsey, Merrie Greenfield, Michael Kingston, and Steve Walker. Jennie Cleghorn managed the always busy stage, LaRonika Thomas provided dramaturgic support, John Pierson designed the graphics for the show, and Allen himself designed the sound, a well-chosen m�lange of classical music.Now the bad news: FringeNYC has provided a space called the Ace of Clubs on Great Jones Street for The Last Two Minutes …, and never has a venue so gotten in the way of enjoying a show, or even hearing and seeing it properly, at least in my experience. The Ace of Clubs is little more than a giant rec room; a low stage and lower audience space make it impossible to see the stage from four or five rows back, and the acoustics in the room are as dead as Solness at the end of The Master Builder. During the first half, whenever the cast members were sitting or otherwise prone, audience members popped up and down in their seats like a badly engineered game of Whack-a-Mole just to get a glance at the stage. Here’s hoping that a version of the show will open soon via the New York branch of the troupe. I’d like to see it again.