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Maria Arndt
Elsa Bernstein

    Rescued from relative obscurity after being discovered by director Tina Landau in an anthology of plays by women, this turn-of-the-century drama – by German playwright Else Bernstein – puts a new spin on the theme of the independent-minded woman struggling against the strictures of her male-dominated society.
    What sets the play apart from more familiar works like A Doll’s House, Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler (the latter also recently revived by the Steppenwolf ensemble), is that the events of this play take place after the woman has made her break for independence. Rather than languishing in domestic drudgery with a head full of grand dreams, this play’s eponymous heroine has already struck out on her own – leaving her sculptor husband in Florence and taking her teenage daughter Gemma to the rural German university town which just happens to be the home of Maria’s former boyfriend, a dashing doctor named Claussner (Christopher Innvar).
    Played gracefully by Steppenwolf company member Molly Regan (whose film credits include Pollock and Bullets Over Broadway), Maria is a woman, tragically ahead of her time, who is sacrificing much of her own happiness so that her daughter might avoid having to make the same decisions – and mistakes – she herself has made. As the play opens, Maria sits writing a letter to her husband, telling him she will soon be returning, but Regan vividly demonstrates the tremendous physical toll this letter takes on its writer, and as she puts down her pen she rocks breathlessly in her chair, visibly straining under the opposing forces – of social responsibility and independence – that keep her in a kind of labored equilibrium for much of the play.
    As Maria interacts with her daughter (played by Greta Sidwell Honold, in a performance brimming with homeschooled precocity), it becomes clear that in many ways her experiment has been a fruitful one. She has moved away from Italy, she says, because she was uncomfortable with the way Italian society seemed to be steering her daughter towards an early marriage before she has had a chance to become a fully rounded and educated woman. So Gemma is gloriously (at first, almost irritatingly) free and happy and opinionated, but fast reaching the age at which the pressure to find a mate begins to manifest itself internally, instead of just socially. The idyllic bubble in which Gemma has been raised is at bursting point, especially with the introduction of handsome young neighbor Otto (Brad Eric Johnson). Otto’s family are almost cartoonishly stuffy. He himself is awkward and stiff, his sister Amanda (Brett Korn, resembling a young version of Austin Powers’ Frau Farbissina) is a slave to fashion who ridicules Gemma’s playful eccentricity, and their father is a patronizing aristocrat who says things like “leave the thinking to the boys,” and might as well wear a sign round his neck saying “Symbol of Male Society.”
    In the play’s most affecting scene, Maria explains to her daughter why she must resist her attraction to Otto. Maria sees women’s role in society as having been reduced to the purely biological, and so their lives can never be anything other than “petty.” In addition to crystallizing the struggle facing the play’s characters, this scene also speaks eloquent volumes about its author, whose obscurity was virtually guaranteed, as she was not only female but also Jewish. Bernstein wrote under the pseudonym Ernst Rosmer, and her style was praised as being “almost masculine,” but she was known to be female, and never fully accepted as a serious playwright. Under the Nazis, she was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and most of her manuscripts were destroyed. This new translation (by Curt Columbus) and high-profile production, then, is something of a belated vindication, but for the most part avoids the smug sense of its own worthiness that often characterizes such revivals.
    Despite her professed passions about the unfairness of women’s treatment, Maria is no one-dimensional proto-feminist role model, as we see in her failure to protect her pregnant chambermaid from the self-righteous housekeeper Agata, and in the barely restrained passion of her interactions with Claussner (which lend a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ irony to her heartfelt admonitions to her daughter). If anything, she is someone who sees herself as having been complicit in her own unhappiness, and sees the education and protection of her daughter as a means of redemption.
    As events unravel in the second act, they do so with a muted dignity that is far removed from the furniture-throwing histrionics with which Steppenwolf made its name. The script is overwritten in places--a key character’s solution to the play’s central problem is so heavily signposted in the symbol-laden script that it’s a wonder it takes them as long as it does to reach their fateful decision. At times the play falls into ‘you can go your own way’ preachiness, but the skilled cast do a magnificent job of finding the truths at its core, so that even the clunkiest of lines (“Mother, you have quite forgotten what it is like to be a child!”) ring true. The ending is troubling, as it seems to undermine much of what we know of its heroine for the sake of hard-hitting melodrama whose aftermath and effects are never explored. The audience, like Gemma herself, is left with a new view of Maria that is at once more complex and less satisfying. Maria’s certainty of the rightness of her chosen course and the passion with which she imparts her beliefs to her daughter ultimately do not make the course any easier for her to stick to, nor the beliefs any easier to live by.