New Haven Independent

Shortly after the scrim rises on a soaring, cerulean blue sky backdropping a modern architectural set, Halvard Solness, the eponymous builder, begins to move through the play like someone who knows he needs therapy but who can’t quite make the commitment.

As played very physically by David Chandler, Solness is not so much wracked by tragic guilt for dire events a dozen years before, as he is neurotically in their thrall. He’s almost an out of control Jerry Seinfeld, or perhaps a shambling Kramer, on a bad day on the Upper West Side.

There should be more gravitas to such suffering, because the burden is enormous: the death of Solness’s twin boys and the subsequent stifling of his wife Aline’s life so that the black-clad woman lives her death-in-life life now only to do what she deems her duty.

Solness and Aline have not given themselves a good Norwegian smooch by the fire in a many a winter, which opens the door for the Other Woman.

Enter Hilda, vivaciously played by Susan Heyward. Solness wowed her a decade before, when she was only 13, with that heroic climb up to the tower of a church he built. He promised her a “kingdom,” a pledge he conveniently forgot, but not she.

If this sounds like a love triangle melodrama, that’s what it is at heart.

Yet Ibsen’s great contribution to theater modernism was to take what had been Victorian niceties and lay them bare, turning the melodrama into plays about real social problems that made him the idol of great reformist playwrights like Bernard Shaw.

The problem for audiences today is that while the means and content Ibsen brought to light might have been shocking to his audiences, much of this feels old hat.

As does Solness’s teeter-tottering of conscience that he just might not be guilty after all, for has he also not confronted the Almighty when he last climbed the tower? He responded to the primary trolls of his nature; he made a pact with fate. In short, is he not also a kind of superman of architecture, a master who can will and direct others to serve his future?

And yet the great man also fears his younger colleague Ragnar surpassing him and of the diminution of his powers.

The play shouldn’t feel as if Ibsen has thrown in all his recent reading, even the fear and trembling induced by his fellow Scandinavian Kierkegaard’s take on the human condition, simply to gild or excuse philandering infidelity with high points from a college reading list.

Director Evan Yionoulis’s challenge, working with a translation by Paul Walsh, was to make sure that a classic felt not like a time capsule but timeless. Alas, I’m not sure that’s achieved in this production.

Of all the play’s mighty themes, fear of the next generation’s taking over — unwilling to pay our social security — might have struck the most resonant chord. That choice was not made.

The ensemble of experienced actors is game enough. Yionoulis moves them about the set in a sprightly manner that keeps the audience from being bored. But we feel the characters are more speechifying than truly at each others’ throats.

For me the most moving moment comes midway in the first act, when Hilda recollects for Solness how his climb to the tower thrilled the air and changed her life, resulting in her coming to collect her chit these ten years later. She tells this story as monologue directly to the audience while Solness looks off into that space he once inhabited. It is a transcendent moment

When the characters resume eye contact and their proto-Freudian, Nietzschean interrogations about each others’ dark despairs, that doesn’t conceal how the play has dropped back down into melodrama, occasionally a melodrama that sarcastically winks at itself and sounds like sitcom dialogue.

It shouldn’t be that way. Yes, these characters are generally unlikeable and have motives obscured by the symbolic weight they carry. (Who can believe, for example, that “Youth,” aka Hilda, spent ten years thinking solely of Solness and timed her arrival to the precise anniversary of the builder’s exploits, and even enters a beat after Solness trembles at Youth knocking at the door?) Still Ibsen prided himself on creating realistic people.

And they are so, emotionally. The characters are flawed and suffering and in deep conflict. Feeling their raw edges far more would have made them time-travel right into our hearts.

Also starring in the production are Felicity Jones as Aline, Irene Sofia Lucio as the master builder’s bookkeeper Kaya, and Robert Hogan and Slate Holmgren, as the father and son employees whose discontent triggers the action. Timothy Brown and Paul Whitaker did the splendid scenic and lighting work. The play runs at the Yale Rep”s University Theater through Oct. 10.