NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — When a playwright chooses to write a new version of a classic work, they must first answer one crucial question: Why? Why rewrite this story?
Their response will dictate how they go about revising the source material. And often, that driving impulse will be written all over the resulting product itself, like genetic coding embedded in its DNA.
Some playwrights want to update a classic text in order to place it in another setting. Others set out to fix problematic works by rewriting them in line with contemporary sensibilities. A few, perhaps, are looking to make a quick buck by adapting a popular IP. And then there are those who have a bone to pick with the original text and its writer.
Firmly planted in that latter cohort is the American dramatist Will Eno, whose 2013 play “Gnit” is currently running at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre.
The work is a new reading of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem “Peer Gynt.” Or, rather, “a faithful, unfaithful and wilfully American misreading,” as it’s been billed.
The overall narrative of this new version hews close to the original, about a restless young man (Peer in Ibsen’s play is now Peter in Eno’s, played by Qasim Khan) who abandons his bride-to-be (Solveig is now Solvay, played by Julia Course) and sets off in search of his true self.
But Eno makes it clear that he was motivated to rewrite Ibsen’s classic because of his lingering frustration with it. “Part of my interest in adapting ‘Peer Gynt’ had to do with this friction between my first sense of the play and my later ones,” he explains in the program.
He goes on to discuss the original play’s troublesome swings in tone, from an almost “clinical” sense of existentialism to something far more sentimental. Eno also says he had a problem with the character of Solveig, who waits for Peer for years after he leaves her, only to forgive him when he finally returns. For Eno, that ending didn’t seem fair. “Or, maybe worse, it didn’t quite feel satisfying,” he writes.
“Gnit” certainly solves all those issues . Yet Eno’s play more than merely fixes the original. It also feels continuously in conversation with Ibsen’s text, with each small revision delivered with a wink and a nudge, as if Eno was flashing a toothy grin behind his computer while he was writing it.
Like “Peer Gynt,” Eno’s version flits between surrealism and realism. As we follow Peter’s journey, time expands and contracts. We move between locations with dreamlike ease.
Meanwhile, the humour throughout is often wry. When, for instance, Solvay asks Peter why his surname is spelled the way it is, he retorts: “It’s a typo.”
What Eno does best, however, is condense Ibsen’s notoriously long story (the original play runs more than five hours over five acts) into a surprisingly efficient two-and-a-half-hour work. And he does it all, again, almost cheekily.
Long, dialogue-heavy scenes in “Peer Gynt” are compressed down to a single line. Ibsen’s gaggle of loquacious townsfolk are played in this version by a single actor (Mike Nadajewski, funny as ever and earning the laughs), who comes to represent the entire town, babbling to himself like a one-man road show attraction.
These cuts and twists lend “Gnit” an air of unseriousness. In a way, it’s kind of fitting. Peter, after all, with his disregard of life, carries a similar sense of flippancy wherever he goes.
But Eno runs with this tongue-in-cheek humour so far that it soon becomes too much of a good thing. At its core, Peter’s story is a profound one. It has something deeply existential to say about how easy it is for us to waste our lives, how our insatiable hunger for fulfilment can turn us away from what we already have. Eno, however, treats these moments as throwaway scenes, as if any discussion of the existential will only be mopish.
Shaw Festival artistic director Tim Carroll’s production doesn’t take itself too seriously, either. Hanne Loosen’s rust-coloured set is whimsical, featuring blocks of different shapes and sizes, and metal pipes hanging from the ceiling that eject various objects and materials throughout the play. The costumes, also designed by Loosen, are similarly eccentric, sometimes charred and fraying at the edges, other times (as in the case of Nadajewski’s costume) completely and humorously absurd.
Qasim Khan offers an intriguing — if not entirely rounded — performance as the title character. His Peter is cold, even unfeeling. He’s a perpetual outsider always looking in, yet never seeking belonging. At times, he walks through the world dazed and confused. “We’re in Egypt?” he questions in one scene, so lost as to where he is. But at other times, Khan portrays Peter as almost too composed and put together. Nehassaiu deGannes elicits sympathy as Peter’s impoverished mother, whose concern for her son ultimately breaks her. And rounding out the six-person cast, Patrick Galligan and Gabriella Sundar Singh are excellent in a variety of secondary roles.
But this production, and Eno’s play, never quite cohere to form a compelling whole. It’s clear that this play is a rebuttal to Ibsen’s original. But what it’s meant to be instead isn’t entirely certain. Like its central character, Eno’s “Gnit” seems to still be searching for its sense of self.
