Acknowledging the murky part of humanity is what UNM theater student Van Hollenbeck looks to do in his directorial debut.
“The Ghost Sonata,” an abstract piece centered on the protagonist’s search for truth in tortured souls, premieres Friday at Theatre X.
Hollenbeck said he’s trying to expose unfiltered truth. He said the characters’ struggle is concealing their darker selves, a common human conflict.
“We have two selves — the self that we put out front and sort of show people, and then there’s something darker and more hideous within us that’s trying to creep out, and we’re always battling it,” he said. “There’s a monster in every one of us.”
The spiritually conflicted characters coexist in a house, the play’s setting. The relationships are complex and unclear. What’s not important is that the audience understands the narrative or details of the relationships, since the play is emotional, Hollenbeck said.
In the house, the characters hide their true selves to mask their past seedy natures. The façade wears thin as the “student” digs deeper into the character’s lives by befriending the “daughter.” In the play, the “daughter” says that, “In madhouses, people say everything they think,” underscoring the play’s social stance.
When August Strindberg wrote the play in 1907, Hollenbeck said, society frowned upon unbarred personal expression, considering it a mental problem. That belief, he said, holds true today.
“I think a lot of the codes and signals that we use in society are based on hiding our true selves,” he said. “Whether those true selves are innately bad or innately good, it’s all about concealing. I think that’s really our culture today, because if somebody expresses their uncensored personal truth, it’s taken as madness or irregularity.”
Hollenbeck said writers like Strindberg saw the darker side of humanity and focused on people concealing their true nature from the outside world.
Throughout the play, the “student” breaks down the characters’ false reality.
A self-proclaimed “embittered optimist,” Hollenbeck said he sees parallels between the “student’s” experience and his own.
“I see it as the illusion breaking down, the sort of puppetry and smoke and mirrors of this pseudo-purgatory world he’s in kind of breaking down and finally collapsing at the end,” Hollenbeck said. “It’s like, yeah, the world is kind of a miserable place to be in, yet somehow that’s OK, that there’s a faint glimmer of hope. As faint as it is, it means everything — that it’s so tiny and, yet, it’s enough to light up the world.”
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Hollenbeck said he identifies with the “student’s” desire for honesty, encouraging a dialogue between him, the cast and the design team.
The play’s abstract nature focuses on morbid emotions, which Hollenbeck said attracted him to the production.
“With realism, it’s always about fighting back the emotion,” he said. “When you get into less realist works, not always, but there is a tendency to sort of let the emotions play out on stage. I think what I would say is that it strikes me as more truthful.”
Hollenbeck said he had a clear idea of what he wanted the performance to look like, and actors were given a rigid framework to develop their characters.
“There’s a lot in it happening really fast, and that’s kind of the way I wanted it, but I do think there may be some hurdles in understanding,” he said. “However, ambiguity can be effective if the actors know exactly what they’re doing. … So even if you don’t know what they’re talking about, you feel what they’re talking about.”
When the play came together, Hollenbeck said he discovered the faint hope Strindberg alludes to, despite Hollenbeck’s initial unease about being a first-time director. He said the experience taught him that life’s downfalls are worth enduring.
“I think my experience trying to get this play up has sort of proven to me its relevance,” he said. “It’s a difficult process getting a play from an idea to an actual thing. It’s a task of networking with people, but it’s also a task of fighting with yourself and getting yourself to go to the next step and encouraging yourself to have the confidence to rise above any sort of mishaps that may occur.”
