Liz Lauren
Jim DeVita and Marcus Truschinski.
The term “sexual predator” is all over the news, but more than a century ago August Strindberg created a character even more powerful and terrifying — the sexually charged “psychic murderer.” In his 1887 essay of the same name, the Swedish playwright described a type of sexual warfare where the winner could, through intellect and sheer force of will, “coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission.”
Strindberg’s Creditors, in the Touchstone at American Players Theatre through Nov. 19, is a dramatic illustration of that misogynous theme, where one diabolical man seeks — and gets — revenge on his ex-wife and her new husband by meticulously getting inside their minds, identifying their weaknesses and insecurities, playing on their deepest fears, and then destroying them from within.
This extraordinary character study is a difficult way to end the season, but it’s also like watching a master class with three of APT’s most gifted actors. Core Company Members Jim DeVita, Tracy Michelle Arnold, and Marcus Truschinski each turn in stunning performances as the expert manipulator and his prey. On a nearly bare stage, unencumbered by the elaborate sets, enormous costumes, and stage magic that characterized some of their work in earlier productions this season (Pericles, Cyrano de Bergerac, A View from the Bridge) this intimate show provides no place for the actors to hide — their characters’ desires, foibles, passions and blind spots are all exposed, laid bare, as several lines in the play suggest, like “an open wound.”
As Adolph, the young artist who has recently lost his confidence and his vision, Truschinski is a mess. He runs rough fingers through his unkempt hair, his bloodshot eyes ringed with dark circles, his face red and raw. Leaning on a crutch, wearing clothes stained with paint smudges, he works on sculpting a female nude, after being “pushed” in a different aesthetic direction by his new friend Gustav (DeVita) — a doctor visiting the beachside resort where Adolph and his wife Tekla return each year to commemorate their initial meeting.
In a tailored, gray, three-piece suit, DeVita precisely cuts the figure of a mentor, a concerned third party who wants to get to the root of his young friend’s trouble and help him overcome his anxieties, in both art and marriage. But of course his real objective is not so benevolent.
Over the course of just a few hours, Gustav has plumbed the depths of Adolph’s every weakness and heightened his innermost fears, planting fictitious wrongs and even diseases in his fertile, unsettled mind. As the doctor becomes more sure of his “diagnosis” and more prescriptive for its cure, the boyish artist crumples like an exhausted child. Disoriented and despondent, he watches his new friend’s ridiculous predictions of his wife’s inconstancy play out, one by one.
As Tekla, the playful but needy older woman, Tracy Michelle Arnold is just as easily manipulated by Gustav — her first husband — who casually strikes up a conversation with her in passing at the resort. With the benefit of time to nurture his anger and his need to hurt her and his replacement, the practiced former lover is deft as a surgeon. He plays on Tekla’s nostalgia for their earlier passion, her insecurities about how attractive she is and her irritations with her current husband. The moment she recognizes his endgame, all coquettish charm drains from Arnold’s face. The turning point of the show, it is stark and painful.
And though we know he is a demon, watching DeVita plant the bombs in these minefields so carefully and precisely is fascinating. One moment he’s a logical, warm, concerned friend. Then, with a flash of his dark eyes and a hard set of his jaw, he revels in detonating each explosion and delights as he surveys the damage.
Underneath the psychological warfare, sound designer Lindsay Jones has placed a faint beating heart and the rhythmic pounding of the resort’s ocean waves, reminding the audience of the fragility of our physical and emotional selves. Similarly, Robert Morgan’s brilliant scene design consists of a clear blue field that changes subtly as DeVita goes for the jugular in each conversation. What first looks like the reddish reflection of a sunset on an azure lake morphs into muddy stains of purple, like blood in the water.
Making these metaphors literal in the final moments of the show feels unnecessary and heavy handed, particularly in a production that capitalizes on the subtlety of the long con. Still, Creditors is as astonishing credit to Maria Aitken’s measured direction and the actors who embody this doomed triangle of love, betrayal and revenge.
