Ray of Light

Going to church to find religion

By Robert Von Stein Redick

Winter Light plays through February 25 at 10 Mayo Street in Portland. Call (207) 874-0285.

DISCONTENT OF WINTER: David Blair and Lisa Stathoplos in Winter Light.

Out from the ice, grime, and wind of a Portland night, into the stillness of an empty church: it’s a comforting start to Winter Light, the new stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film by members of the former Out of Cake Theater Company. The makeshift performance space at 10 Mayo Street is, in fact, a former church: our seats look out from behind an imagined alter at a row of miniature pews; around us, organ music swells, confident and grand.

But the comfort is short-lived. In a corner of the white-walled room, beside a tiny crucifix and candle, kneels a young man, face and body clenched against pain. When the pastor and his tiny congregation file in, every face is stamped with somber melancholy.

“I have always tried to make my films appealing,” Bergman wrote. “But I was not so stupid as to believe that Winter Light would be a public favorite. Unfortunate, perhaps, but inevitable.”

He had a way with withering judgements. It is an uneasy gift, shared by artists as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Leonard Cohen — or to risk a heretical comparison, Oliver Stone: the ability to marry ecstatic vision with the bleakest skepticism. In the night-storms of these creative minds, humanity itself may be unredeemable. When asked about his politics in a 1968 interview, Bergman was blunt:

“I’ve a strong impression our world’s about to go under. Our political systems are deeply compromised and have no further uses. Our social behavior patterns — interior and exterior — have proved a fiasco . . . just around the corner an insect world is waiting for us, and one day it’s going to roll in over our ultra-individualized existence. Otherwise I’m a respectable social democrat.”

 

Perhaps some shadow of the agonies of Winter Light, completed six years earlier, informed Bergman’s response. In the film, doubt is religious, not political: the grim hero is a pastor, Tomas Ericsson (portrayed by David Blair in the play), whose faith is cracking during a few hours on a frigid Scandinavian Sunday. Yet God, as he recedes, takes hideous shapes for Father Tomas: “a spider god — a monster.” And his spiritual crisis is made acute by a suicidal parishioner’s fears of nuclear war, and Tomas’s own memory of a childhood dream, in which he is abandoned “in a completely dead world.”

It’s enough to make one long for atheism. Still, both in Bergman’s film and Louis Frederick’s compelling new stage adaptation, Winter Light is a moving, even uplifting experience — though not for everyday reasons.

Tomas’s pain is acute, and magnified cruelly by his certainty that he must bear it alone. In gleaming white vestments he gives communion to his withered flock of five: “Christ’s blood shed for thee, Christ’s blood —” and the words are squeezed out, fast and flat, their ends bitten off. Even Blair’s face, a moving scrim of emotions squashed just before they surface in a grimace or scowl, upholds the idea of a man torn between inner agonies and the straightjacket of outer formality.

Only two persons can tempt the pastor out of his shell. Jonas, the suicidal parishioner (Michael Crockett), succeeds because Tomas needs to redeem him, as a proof of God’s efficacy. Marta, Tomas’s wan and self-deprecating lover (Lisa Stathoplos), succeeds because he needs her very human love. Alas, neither Jonas nor Marta tempts him far enough: while he can confess his doubts, reaching out for help is something Tomas dares not contemplate.

The story’s cruel symmetries, the way each avenue of escape for these three lies blocked by a stone wall of character, go a long way towards supporting Bergman’s prediction for Winter Light: you don’t come out of this one whistling Dixie. You will, however, come out knowing that you’ve seen fine actors at work. Alongside Blair’s tortured clergyman, Stathoplos depicts a parallel rage. Her Marta hides behind awkward glasses, bohemian scarves and skirt, mincing smiles: these, like her teasings and sarcasm, mask an overwhelming dedication to Tomas, cold fish that he is. The smothered passion between these two is a delightful agony. When Marta finally hazards her heart in a love letter, Tomas’s indifference may make you want to kick him in the backside — quite an accomplishment for a preacher without a television show.

The finest moments of Winter Light, however, are unspoken. Like the filmmaker, whose skill with framing and gesture was legendary, Frederick and his team pay strict attention to glances, chuckles, coughs: all the stratagems by which these characters hide from one another. Thus Tomas might not have said a word to Jonas, when the latter comes for help. His dropped eyes and shaking hands say loud and clear I cannot help you, I can’t even help myself.

Those shaking hands, and many other small brush-strokes of personality, are not mere reproductions of Bergman’s effects, however. Crucially, the staged Winter Light keeps a certain imagistic distance from the film. The minor figures form a chorus to paint in words what cannot be staged: the rush of a passing train, the bounding of a dog, the surge of a river. Frederick even went so far as to cast actors with no prior knowledge of the film (though the Phoenix Intelligence Unit is busy lifting fingerprints from the tape at Videoport) and the results vindicate his decision. No efforts here to channel the original Jonas (Max Von Sydow) or Marta (Ingrid Thuland), and Blair’s Tomas does not much trouble the ghost of Bergman’s leading man, Gunnar Björnstrand.

My one substantial argument with this production — besides the disappearance of some quiet lines to the room’s hollow corners — is that it does not take its heresy far enough. In a drama of delicate effects, I found myself hungry for the moment when the actors would dare to disrespect the master. Plays, after all, re-imagine themselves with each production: one year’s sinister uncle is the next’s tragic hero. A re-imagined Winter Light could certainly flop, like any play. It should not, however, leave us with the question Jonas poses to Tomas: why exist at all?

Ultimately, the pastor does seem to find an answer to that question. Opinions as to its nature will vary, even at so basic a level as the existence of God; still his search is as lovely to witness as it is painful to feel.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.