'The Ghost Sonata' is haunting, ambiguous

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'The Ghost Sonata' 8 p.m. today, tomorrow, 2 p.m. Sunday. Today's performance will be followed by a post-show discussion Earle Ernst Lab Theatre, University of Hawai'i-Manoa $10, $8, and $3 956-7655

The play is an early study in Expressionism, focusing on emotions and discarding realistic characters and a linear story line. In it, we see and hear inner feelings in a dream-like world of suspended reality, symbolized by characters removing their social masks to reveal thoughts that would normally go unsaid.

Strindberg wrote it as a chamber play for performance in a small theater and patterned it after the musical form by building themes instead of a plot. Those themes are darkly pessimistic in their expression of secrets and disappointments. Characters include ghosts and a mummy, and the action happens somewhere vaguely between life and death.

Goodlander's decision to stage the work by borrowing heavily from Japanese noh theater is an excellent choice. Fans, kimonos, ritual movements and vocal patterns add an unexpected twist and underscore the heavily stylized nature of the piece.

Unfortunately the combination works too successfully and lulls us into suspended animation for much of its 90-minute length.

Nara Cardenas' black and gray costumes stand out sharply against the shoji screens in Cheryl Taong's stark white set. An old man in a wheelchair is prominent. Additional characters take the stage with dance-like steps to moody cello music, and women with cropped haircuts in all the male roles add an eerie vocal and visual dimension.

We know immediately that we're not in for a traditional, representational experience.

But while the simplicity of the staging matches the poetry of the language, it is likely to mesmerize its audience instead of engaging it. We get the point that manners are the masks behind which people hide their real feelings, and that freely speaking each emotion can lead to social chaos.

Curiously, we're more likely to connect intellectually than emotionally, but once into the play's structured repetition, equally likely to disconnect early. For a while, we might work at understanding the Student, the Daughter, the Mummy, or the Colonel, but soon find it much easier to let the sonata wash over us, possibly noting the patterns but letting the notes slide by.

That leaves the audience, much like the characters, floating someplace between mind and heart.