Review: Steppenwolf‘s ‘Dance of Death’ finds humor in the portrayal of deep unhappiness

“I know that particular feeling…, ” says the character Kurt, a friendly yet appalled observer of the miserable, ever-battling married couple at the core of “The Dance of Death,” an August Strindberg classic written in 1900. “Hate and love forged together in the foundry of hell.”

Surprisingly, in a new Steppenwolf Theatre production, this depressingly honest description of the central relationship comes across as a laugh line.

Finding humor in the portrayal of deep unhappiness turns out to be the key that unlocks this emotionally and stylistically complicated play. It results in a show as deliriously entertaining as it is astonishingly profound.

It’s always been fair to consider this work — often considered an inspiration for Edward Albee’s bad-marriage exemplar “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — a dark comedy, but a budding one, more heavy than comic, more earnest than ridiculous, more Nietzsche (a frequent Strindberg pen pal) than, say, Ionesco or Beckett.

Not here.

Director Yasen Peyankov, helped by Conor McPherson’s translation/adaptation and an unimprovable cast, goes full bore into the funny, which, bizarrely, makes the marriage just as hellish yet far more understandable, and the play more psychologically real and raw.

Edgar (Jeff Perry) and Alice (Kathryn Erbe) are about to celebrate — or rather, rue — their silver anniversary. Edgar is a middling military officer at a garrison on a small island, where he dislikes everyone as much as they dislike him: “Was ever a greater horde of imbeciles crowded into so small a space?” he asks.

So he spends nearly all his time with Alice in their home, which — in Collette Pollard’s set design — possesses all the concrete charmlessness of a prison, which it used to be. Alice, a former actress who has better manners, perhaps, but shares her husband’s haughty superiority to their neighbors, manages to insult her servants to the point that they leave and then bemoans the wear on her hands from housework she doesn’t seem to do.

She insults Edgar even more, and he returns the favor.

Their one pleasure, likely done daily, is for Alice to play a march on the piano that Edgar dances to.

The dance epitomizes Perry’s unique take on Edgar — it’s kooky yet committed. Like so much of what Edgar does in this play, Perry makes it impossible to know whether the character takes the dance seriously or is being purposefully silly, just as nobody can ever tell whether he’s telling the truth, even when he’s clutching his heart or his head in pain.

That includes Alice, but even more so the third wheel in the play, Alice’s cousin Curt (Cliff Chamberlain), who introduced the couple before his own difficult divorce led him to leave the country. He has returned to establish a quarantine ward on the island. His arrival provides a new opportunity — perhaps the first since they sent their two children to boarding school — for the couple to compete for someone’s sympathy, demanding in essence that he take sides in their ongoing warfare, which they relish as much as they despise.

The performances are all extraordinary and, essentially, intertwined. This really is Steppenwolf acting at its very best, and that’s saying a whole lot. It’s quirkily personal, wholly involved, thoroughly in the moment, unafraid of embracing the characters’ darkest instincts, deepest guilt or strangest desires.

Peyankov matches their fearlessness, letting the style of this work be so many different things at once while making it all feel like it couldn’t be any other way. It’s naturalistic — these are real people in a real place and time confronting and confused by real emotions that they couldn’t explain even if they wanted to. It’s expressionistic — in Rick Sims’ sound design, Edgar seems to be chased by a voice calling him to the grave. It’s absurdist — Edgar and Alice, like Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot,” seem above all to simply be desperately filling the time in a world where purpose is a punch line.

It’s certainly not a coincidence that Perry’s hair and mustache are styled to resemble portraits of Strindberg himself. What emerges so clearly here is the deep and direct engagement of interpretive artists — directors, actors, designers, even the adapter — with the source creator, and not with the preconceived notions that have built up around him.

The Swedish Strindberg himself bore plenty of suffering, many of the details reflected in various plot points of “Dance of Death.” But one thing I now know for sure. He developed, or maintained, a deeply dark sense of humor.

I’ll never see his work the same way again.