Theater Review: Master Builder

  Spend an evening at the rocky beginning of the sexual revolution. The Brooklyn Academy of  Music  Harvey Theater presents the fascinating, brilliant and terribly neurotic Master Builder.
     ’The Master Builder’ by, Henrik Ibsen, translated by Dave Eggers and directed by Andrei Belgrader, is in every way the hottest show in town.  In the first act all the characters are apparently clumsy and often act with humor both sly and open.  Burlesque seems to be always in the mind of the translator ,director and actors. In the first act.
    John Turturro (Halvard Solness) is the last ‘Master Builder’  of the old guild system.  With all the important commissions  going to Architects He can now build only homes..
    He compensates by ways familiar to us  to this day. He rapes a fourteen year old girl on the day of his last church  commission.  The day he lost his faith in god and himself.   Wrenn Schmidt (Hilde Wangel)  plays the young woman who was raped and visits him to pick-up a promised property. Kelly Hutchinson (Kaja Fosli),  who both works for the master builder and his mistress.  The perfect frosty Ibsen wife  Katherine Borowitz (Aline Solness) knows that sex games are going on can not admit it.
    Like many of plays of the higher theater, both classic and modern, this play requires an understanding of the complete work.  This includes all of the higher arts.  In this case the sex was so strong for some sexually disturbed  patrons that they had to walk before or during intermission.  Even some ‘critics’ perhaps walked a out as well.  Just saying.
    I won’t go into detail  about the second act but  it will tell you why Freud wrote ‘Shakespeare, Ibsen e Dostoevskij: 1913 27’  and Why the good  Dr. Freud said it was his favorite Ibsen play. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce and George Bernard Shaw pretty much thought it was the great work of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
Lets all thank BAM, Mr. Eggers,  Mr. Belgrader ,  John Turturro and the rest of the artists for a rare great evening.
Special thanks to every one involved for having the guts for jumping the sexual bubble in this production. I am proud to say I had random fun sexual feelings for Ms. Hutchinson and Ms. Schmidt.    I don’t know why I shouldn’t have