Peer Gynt

A medley of bright colors, elaborate costumes, giant papier-mâché puppets and marionette dolls stole the show at Portland Stage Company's "Peer Gynt" on Saturday night. The production's appealing aesthetic shook out a colorful, puppet based-theme that tied together Norwegian folklore and a feeling of having stepped through the looking glass.

The opening prologue presents Solveig, who is Gynt's eventual love, in a yellow dress all alone in a dark stage with a doll that looks like Gynt; another doll is moved above Solveig to imitate her actions. Solveig's pensive waiting, portrayed stoically Sally Wood, between childhood and adulthood symbolizes the questions that Peer Gynt's long journey resides in.

The start is stark, dramatic, sad and full of childhood innocence, an innocence that Gynt searches for, rather than confronts, becoming the albatross around his neck.

Noah Brody plays Gynt with the necessary high energy and boyish exuberance. He is feisty yet gullible, heroic yet foolish and a lover yet selfish. The play itself works in sorting out these parameters in adventures around the world with trolls, wealth and common town folk.

Anita Stewart, who doubles as director and set designer, has done marvelous combining the two roles to make a strange and wonderful world. Each new scene has a magical quality brought about by colors and puppets both small and very large.

[Solveig, played by Sally Wood, stands alone and pensive on the stage in the opening prologue. Photo: Aaron Flacke]

But the play itself drags a bit. It may be because "Peer Gynt" was originally a dramatic poem, or because "Peer Gynt", like Shakespeare's "The Tempest", may be Ibsen's attempt to connect with his audience in a very personal and autobiographical way, but, like "The Tempest", it feels awkward and at times forced.

[Peer Gynt is wined and dined by the troll community that hopes to steal him for their own. Photo: Darren Setlo]

This brings the Epiblogue to ask, at the risk of sounding like a traitor to the classics, a certain question: Why not cut these productions down? There is a purism that prevents the classics from being edited, but the second half of the nearly three-hour Gynt production saw a noticeable reduction in the audience.

On this note, the Epiblogue wants to jump on a soapbox: in a world of instant music, YouTube and hollywood films, it seems that an audience doesn't always have the attention span it might have had before multimedia. Instead of insisting an audience appreciate the old style, why not give the story in an hour and a half? The story stays intact, the action is quicker and everyone is happy. That's our thought and we'll consider yours.

That said, the Portland Stage Company performed another feat of precision and talent in Peer Gynt. Their productions are consistently well acted, directed and designed, and here they have succeeded again.

The show is a wonderful stimulation to the visual palette and will be running until Feb. 22.