Master manipulator: 'Creditors' is a master class from American Players Theatre veterans

By Gwendolyn Rice, The Isthmus

November 9, 2017

The term “sexual predator” is all over the news, but more than a century ago August Strindberg created a character even more powerful and terrifying — the sexually charged “psychic murderer.” In his 1887 essay of the same name, the Swedish playwright described a type of sexual warfare where the winner could, through intellect and sheer force of will, “coerce a more impressionable psyche into submission.”

Strindberg’s Creditors, in the Touchstone at American Players Theatre through Nov. 19, is a dramatic illustration of that misogynous theme, where one diabolical man seeks — and gets — revenge on his ex-wife and her new husband by meticulously getting inside their minds, identifying their weaknesses and insecurities, playing on their deepest fears, and then destroying them from within.

This extraordinary character study is a difficult way to end the season, but it’s also like watching a master class with three of APT’s most gifted actors. Core Company Members Jim DeVita, Tracy Michelle Arnold, and Marcus Truschinski each turn in stunning performances as the expert manipulator and his prey. On a nearly bare stage, unencumbered by the elaborate sets, enormous costumes, and stage magic that characterized some of their work in earlier productions this season (Pericles, Cyrano de Bergerac, A View from the Bridge) this intimate show provides no place for the actors to hide — their characters’ desires, foibles, passions and blind spots are all exposed, laid bare, as several lines in the play suggest, like “an open wound.”

As Adolph, the young artist who has recently lost his confidence and his vision, Truschinski is a mess. He runs rough fingers through his unkempt hair, his bloodshot eyes ringed with dark circles, his face red and raw. Leaning on a crutch, wearing clothes stained with paint smudges, he works on sculpting a female nude, after being “pushed” in a different aesthetic direction by his new friend Gustav (DeVita) — a doctor visiting the beachside resort where Adolph and his wife Tekla return each year to commemorate their initial meeting.

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