Maria Arndt
What makes Bernstein’s drama unique even today is that its central relationship is not an adult love affair but Maria’s enduring love for her teenage daughter, Gemma. Children–particularly female children–don’t figure this prominently in Ibsen’s major works (with the exception of Hedvig in The Wild Duck). In fact Ingmar Bergman did away with the juvenile characters altogether in Nora, his stage adaptation of A Doll’s House, perhaps an acknowledgment that they’re more set decoration than three-dimensional beings.
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And despite the melodrama, Maria Arndt has a delightful sense of fun, often at the expense of the male characters. The barely disguised competition between Gemma and Claussner over Maria is an occasional source of humor; at one point Gemma says witheringly of his increased confidence, “He seems taller than he used to be.” Handsome but self-involved Otto (Brad Eric Johnson), the object of Gemma’s affections, pouts about her bookworm tendencies: “I hate those books. They take you away from me.” His father, Von Tucher, criticizes Maria’s intellectuality (“I see a beautiful woman, yet you talk like a man”) but scolds his pinched, repressed daughter, Amanda (Brett Korn), for being unable to talk about her studies coherently–in his eyes, her tangents are proof of women’s moral weakness. Sadly, this is the area of Bernstein’s play that’s most resonant today: by and large we’ve accommodated women’s sexuality, but female intelligence is still often suspect and threatening. (Bernstein at first wrote under the pseudonym “Ernst Rosmer” but was quickly outed as a woman–and her style praised as “almost masculine.”)
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
