A spiteful stranger. A jealous husband. An emasculating woman. A sudden death.
Sounds like the ingredients of a Hitchcock thriller or a nighttime soap opera.
Those three characters are creations of August Strindberg, however, and they weave an intense, if melodramatic, spell at La Jolla Playhouse, where playwright Doug Wright has made an impressive directorial debut with "Creditors."
The unsavory title of the little-produced 1888 play, here adapted by Wright, aptly describes the tight triangle of debts and collections that develops in real time at a seaside hotel toward the end of the 19th century.
We first meet two men ---- a fragile artist, Adolf, and a manipulative stranger, Gustav. Their scene is long, psychologically convoluted, and sometimes laced with humor as, like Iago, Gustav breeds doubts in the receptive mind of his prey, Adolf. Actor T. Ryder Smith is characteristically brilliant as the dapper, wily villain whose motives are kept from the audience in good Ibsenite fashion until the playwright is ready to spring a surprise.
In the more difficult role of Adolf, Omar Metwally suggests precisely the torment that wracked the life of Strindberg, who wrote this play in the same year as his more familiar dissection of a fatally destructive seduction, "Miss Julie."
Both men are poisoned by their suspicions ---- and whether the sporadically mad and misogynistic Strindberg intended it or not, both men are ruined by their deep-down fear of, and hostility toward, women. Though he seems to cherish his wife's independence, long before he met Gustav, Adolf vacillated between adoration and revulsion when contemplating his beautiful spouse, Tekla.
She left her husband for him (he can't forget that she was married before) and somewhere out there lurks "a man waiting for my humiliation." That man, we soon learn, is Gustav. And Gustav reveals that he married a very young Tekla in hopes of controlling her. He says he rescued her from her mother, wiped her slate clean, and then wrote as he pleased upon this tabula rasa, but she eventually divorced him.
And who is Tekla?
When she finally comes on, all in white after the overlong first scene, she seems an attractive enough flirt, playful at first with her suspicious husband, Adolf. Eventually as he confronts and accuses her in ways she cannot turn to lovemaking, she becomes defiant. Actor Kathryn Meisle looks right in the part of a Swedish beauty passing her prime, but robust and vigorously attuned to life, unlike her semi-invalid husband.
Her voice is not the most attractive, and the role requires a certain naivete in the face of Gustav's eventual new seduction, a credulity Meisle doesn't integrate with other elements of the character she portrays. Perhaps no actor could.
Still, Meisle holds her own in the emotional dynamic, which Wright has here so skillfully balanced. Strindberg screws the psychic tension even tighter by making Tekla an artist, too, or at least a would-be artist. We never quite know whether her success as a novelist is because of Adolf's connections and intervention (as he claims) or because of her own talent (as she says repeatedly: "You did not write my book!")
Her first major novel fictionalized her relationship to her first husband, Gustav, who's depicted as a cad, if not an idiot. So his motivation for revenge is twofold: destroy the man who cuckolded him, and ruin the woman who first dishonored, then publicly shamed him.
Smith's handling of Gustav's final monologue of retribution is masterful, anatomizing the man's viciously Puritanical and insecure character, as well as his deep and needy attachment to Tekla. Watching him is like glimpsing an emotional car wreck; you simply can't turn away.
UC San Diego grad and frequent Playhouse designer Robert Brill created the elegant, blue-gray taste-of-the-salty-sea set. Japhy Weideman did the wonderful watery shimmer in the lighting, and David Van Tieghem contributed the ominous, but not obtrusive music.
In the end, despite a few moments that feel dated or even preposterous, it's the unvarnished and bravely exposed acting, subtly calibrated by Wright, that makes the intermissionless drama feel like a vivisection of Strindberg's troubled heart and mind.
"Creditors"
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 7 p.m. Sundays; through Oct. 25
Where: Potiker Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse complex, UC San Diego, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30-$65
Info: 858-550-1010
Web: lajollaplayhouse.com
