Review: Creditors, Revisionist Strindberg for Sad Hipsters

“No relationship is a relationship of equals,” an older man tells a younger man in Jen Silverman’s new adaptation of August Strindberg’s Creditors. “Equals aren’t attracted to each other…Some of us long to wield power, some of us long to serve the powerful.” And the wide-eyed youngster takes it all in, as if hearing a secret revelation whispered into his ear for the first time…perhaps through an audio book or podcast.

This modern revision of the famously dour Swede’s 1889 three-person drama is now performing in rep with Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes at the Minetta Lane Theatre, in a co-production from Audible and Together.

It takes place in the lounge of an island hotel where Tekla (Maggie Siff) is staying with her second husband, Adi (Justice Smith). She’s an acclaimed author, her latest book offering salacious details about her first marriage. He’s a visual artist in a career rut. But perhaps a mysterious guest at the hotel named Gustav (Liev Schreiber), who has been spending every evening with Adi as Tekla is off cavorting with the literati, is just the guy to get him out of it. His advice to move into sculpture is the least of it.

He informs Adi that everyone thinks he’s a cuck, and that what Tekla did to her first husband she can easily do to him. He coaches Adi to stand up straight, confront his wife, and take back his manly power: “She thinks she’s the only one who can dissect the human psyche. The only one who can write chapter after chapter in which she lays us all bare on the operating table. I’ll tell you something, Adi. You can do it too.” And we know poor dumb Adi will take the bait.

While updating the language and giving the monologues a much-needed trim, Silverman has remained mostly faithful to Strindberg’s plot, which reads like the revenge fantasy of an insomniac divorcé—meaning a lot of men are having a variation of it right now as you read this line.

Strindberg, along with Friedrich Nietzsche (whose influence is palpable in Creditors), was a founding member of the manosphere back in the late 19^th century, when women were just beginning to organize, and some highly insecure (but perhaps also prescient) men first recognized that they too would have to become a distinct political class if they were to retain power in the future. Strindberg wrote Creditors within a year of both Miss Julie and The Father, two plays with domineering women as the chief antagonists. It’s a curious choice of source material for the writer of Collective Rage.

But it also proves to be a thrilling one, the friction of wildly different perspectives occasionally sparking fire. This is especially felt in the acting, with director Ian Rickson leading two-thirds of the cast to memorable performances.

Schreiber communicates so much with so little in his portrayal of Gustav. Rolling and smoking cigarette after cigarette, he placidly listens to Adi, betraying nothing with his stony expression. When he finally does speak his mind, it is with unassailable authority. Adi would follow him anywhere and it’s obvious why. He is dad—Jordan Peterson without the whiny Canadian vowels.

Unfortunately, Smith’s performance negates what little suspense might be squeezed from his character’s inevitable capitulation. We can hear the calculation in every thoughtful pause and incredulous retort, making Adi seem not entirely present.

No so with Siff, who has the most difficult job in the cast, conveying the power of an independent modern woman without becoming the Strindbergian harpy she was originally meant to be. She pulls off this balance beam routine and more, wordlessly letting us know exactly why her first marriage fell apart: She became his equal, and then his superior.

These shifting power dynamics play out on Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones’s set, which takes advantage of the enormity and exposed brick of the Minnetta Lane to suggest a cavernous warehouse redecorated in the style of a Victorian hunting lodge. It’s the coolest new hotel bar in Tribeca, handsomely lit with mismatched antique incandescent lamps (lighting by Isabella Byrd). Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes pull the action further into the vague now, their muted colors and inexplicably expensive fabrics telling us so much about these people: rich, well-connected, and depressed. This is the rainbow on Lexapro, the deity we have engineered to fill the void left by Nietzsche’s dead God.

Silverman’s major artistic liberty comes at the very end and constitutes the only false note in the script, as the three actors stand in a circle performing a breathing exercise—or perhaps an exorcism of the original playwright’s restless spirit. If only Strindberg had gone to therapy, it lamely offers.

It’s an unsatisfying answer to a much harder question about power, desire, and the place of masculinity in civilization—one that Strindberg’s plays will continue to raise. Because there is still something compelling about Creditors, something truthful, raw, and politically inconvenient that will almost certainly survive today’s fashionable manners and quick-fix solutions.