'Creditors' is a toxic portrait of sexism and marriage

By Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

November 6, 2017

“Miss Julie” is better known and more frequently revived, but August Strindberg always maintained that “Creditors” — written in the same year of 1888 — was the better play.  Closing out its 2017 season, American Players Theatre is making the case for this bitterly funny, disturbingly toxic portrait of marriage in a production directed by Maria Aitken.

As things get underway, a young and disheveled sculptor (Marcus Truschinski) is receiving what seems like well-meaning fatherly advice from an older, impeccably dressed mentor (Jim DeVita).  Young Adolph is in a rut, artistically and in his marriage to the older Tekla (Tracy Michelle Arnold, who is married to Truschinski in real life).

Or so Gustav tells Truschinski’s boyishly impressionable Adolph, who’d long ago won Tekla’s heart while she was still married to her first husband.  It’s soon apparent to us — albeit not to Adolph — that Tekla’s long-ago husband is Gustav himself, circling his young and unsuspecting prey like a cat playing with a mouse.

DeVita’s Gustav is apt to remind APT regulars of his searing 2004 Iago, equally misogynistic and intent on revenge.  Like Iago, Gustav is adept at stirring the pot. 

But DeVita’s Gustav is an ostensibly cooler customer, which makes the intensity in his hate-filled eyes — and his occasional jabs of rancid, sardonic humor — all the more chilling.  He systematically dismantles Adolph’s love for Tekla, reducing her to a succubus draining men of their energy and a flirt who can’t be trusted to remain faithful.

Much like the material he sculpts with, Adolph is putty in this manipulator’s hands.  Truschinski plays him as a comically foppish lightweight, attractive to Tekla because he’s a pretty boy who makes her feel young, while allowing her to dominate their relationship.

Continue reading