The Stranger is a multi-media adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea.  Leda – once New York's art rock goddess – now lives a different life as wife to a psychiatrist on Cape Cod.  But when the ghost of her past comes calling, she is forced to reckon with both selves and with a love that is marred and sealed by violence. 

Through video, text and music we enter/exit the intense and unreliable subjectivity of a fractured woman.  You are invited to mine the sensual experience of obsession.  Songs, created in collaboration with a composer, will be sung live “in concert.”  The impulse behind this adaptation was an observed kinship between Ibsen and Hitchcock.  The Stranger began – metaphorically speaking – as a conversation between these two great storytellers, both intrepid explorers of the psyche and the psychic.  What is the nature of ritual?  Of sacrifice?  Where is the power in reenactment?  In repetition?  At what point does loss of control become mastery?  Where in entrapment lies the gateway to release?  How do we live with ourselves?

Jennifer Gibbs began exploring The Lady From the Sea in 1996 when she brought together a group of actors and one composer for a yearlong working journey into Ibsen’s genre-smashing play.  Several years ago she began writing, with screenwriter Jennifer Turner Hall, a film script inspired by that work. The film, in turn, inspired the collaboration with director Kristin Marting on this live piece for stage.

 

PRAISE FOR THE CREATORS' PAST WORK:

“Gibbs is poised and charismatic as she slinks through…notions of rhyme and reason, vice and verse.” — TIME OUT New York

“[Marting] synthesizes minimal dialogue, stylized action, and music into compressed visceral drama.” — Village Voice
 

The impulse behind The Stranger was an observed kinship between Ibsen and Hitchcock.  We watched “Vertigo” and “Spellbound.”  When you’re in the room with Hitchcock and Ibsen, you’re in the room with Freud.  We bounced off Freud’s theories and his own neuroses – both influenced by Ibsen.  We noticed Ibsen, Hitchcock and Freud are all very funny.  We talked about Jennifer Gibbs’s experience rehearsing the original, presenting it to small audiences, when she found real intimacy, dark silliness and a seamless incorporation of the supernatural within the everyday.  The writing progressed under Ibsen’s narrative “whip”: following his method of unfolding story and character to create a special suspense.

The next phase will be influenced by Bataille’s “Visions of Excess” as counterpoint to Freud and as true to Ibsen’s more complicated vision.  We will delve into “Festival”: the process – ripe with sacrifice – through which surplus energy must be expended.

Individual Artist Statement:  Jennifer Gibbs
I am often, in my writing, a scavenger of rhythm.  The rhythm of words can be both music and meaning.  Say I riff off some found text.  Playing a foreign sound against – or in harmony with – my native voice opens me up to new ways of being, and of telling a story.  I am drawn to the tension between the explosive potential of words and the structures that contain them.  Working off the source material for The Stranger has been a deep variation on the scavenger aspect of my usual process.
 

Jennifer Gibbs is a playwright and performer who thinks in collage and sees text as music.  Jennifer’s solo show IMMORTALITY (Edna St. Vincent Millay) won the 2005 New York Fringe Festival Overall Excellence Award  (Outstanding Performance).  Her mini-musical HOT is part of THE AUDIENCE, a full-length co-created by 30 playwrights, composers and lyricists that garnered 3 Drama Desk nominations (Transport Group).  Jennifer’s other plays – which include 2GETHER, DIARY OF A PROPHET, THE SWEATER GIRL and the screenplay THE STRANGER – have been developed/presented at Cherry Lane, Williamstown, E.S.T., Joe’s Pub, The Public, Makor Center, Voice & Vision Lab NYC, The Lark, Hypothetical, Manhattan Theater Source, Access, Working Artists, Transport Group and elsewhere.  As an actor she has played many roles Off-Broadway and regionally.  Residencies include Voice & Vision ENVISION and Atlantic Center for the Arts.  She is an Associated Artist at Transport Group and an Affiliated Artist at New Georges.  Jennifer founded collective First Fig to encourage artists from different backgrounds to cross-pollinate.  Among other projects, she produces the First Fig series at Joe’s Pub, showing new work from renowned and rising genre-benders.  A Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, she received her graduate degree in Comparative Literature.

Kristin Marting (Director)  Over the last 17 years, Kristin Marting has constructed 20 works for the stage, including 8 original dance-theatre pieces, 8 new adaptations of novels and short stories and 4 classic plays.  Recent projects include co-creation with Juliet Chia and David Morris and direction of a collaborative alternative musical, Orpheus, based on the Greek myth; also with Chia and Morris, she developed and directed Erendira, a hybrid performance work adapted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother; direction of James Scruggs’s solo work Disposable Men; Dead Tech a collaborative, site-specific theatrical collage based on The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen and architectural texts.  For the last 10 years, she has been developing a unique hybrid directorial/choreographic form that features a "gestural vocabulary" used both as an emotional signifier and as a choreographic element.  She is a co-founder and Executive Director of HERE, where she cultivates artists and programs all events for two performance spaces – including 8 OBIE-award winners – for an annual audience of 50,000.  She regularly serves on grant panels for TCG and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others.