New Haven Independent

Edelstein is coming up to bat again, at Long Wharf Theatre.

Since he was a teenager Edelstein has been compiling a list of the great plays he has always yearned to direct. He caps off the new Long Wharf season this spring with one of them, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which he approaches with humility, and high anxiety.

Edelstein, Long Wharf’s artistic director, is an intense man whose energy and thoughtfulness seem to be in a kind of enthusiastic balance. He turns 55 this month, around the start of the new Long Wharf season.

He counts himself fortunate — as well as deserving after three decades of work in the theater — finally to be in a position to stage the classics that he loves. He sat down with the Independent to talk about his approach to the great classics — about finding a new way to “sing” a classic piece — and also how an artistic director puts together a season.

Independent: You’ve done Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Moon for the Misbegotten by O’Neill, Arthur Miller’s The Price, and your last season’s innovative adaptation of Glass Menagerie by Tenessee Williams was so well received it’s going to Broadway. Why now A Doll’s House?

GE: As I was thinking of our economic moment, the values we live by and how living wrong values imprisons us, I reread [A Doll’s House]: It’s a story of how a husband gets a great job at an investment bank! I know a lot of families like this, where the wife doesn’t work and the “trade” has been made, financial comfort traded for dutiful support.

Independent: Your adaptation is currently being described as a kind of modernization. Can you hint at what it might look like?

GE: The Noras of America, if you take away the corsets and doilies, their lives are not that different from people we know right now. I’m looking at the play through that lens, and I’m scared to death.

Independent: You’re such an experienced and successful director, why “scared to death”?

GE: Even the greatest of theater artists — Ibsen, O’Neill, Miller, Chekhov — produced just a handful of great masterpieces. Each time you come to bat [to produce and direct one of them], you risk utter failure. It’s not like you’re performing the same scientific experiment again.

Independent: Can you describe some of the challenges?

GE: There are some similarities, but [each play is] mostly different. Each play presents a whole new set of challenges. [And] very few directors are good at everything.

Independent: You in part made your reputation through a commitment to new, experimental work, you’ve said. That of course can be dicey. But with A Doll’s House, you already know it’s a great play.

GE: I’m an interpretive artist. The song is already written before. I figure out how to sing it. The song is already written before I figure out how to sing it. If it’s a great song, it’s a lot easier to make it effective. On the other hand, if there are received ideas of the popular ones, [I ask myself], Do I have something to say about that song of any value? I try to choose where I can add something.

Independent: Do other directors approach the classics differently?

GE: What separates me from my colleagues is that at the age of 30, I don’t think I was ready. Yet I wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity! As a director in solid middle age, I feel developmentally ready to take on the great plays I loved all my life. For me it’s a payoff of a life spent in the theater.

Independent: But you’re still full of humility.

GE: I may not be ready now, but the challenge is you’re finally measuring yourself up against great things. Even with a great success, it’s only partial. With Glass Menagerie, I never say: I nailed it!

Independent: Tell me about the rest of the season, the five plays preceding the Ibsen. How do choices get made and a season come together beginning with the opener The Fantasticks, and isn’t the tough economic climate you mentioned a particular factor this year?

GE: Given the economic climate, this season has many cutbacks, but no artistic compromise. Each play I love and believe in. My job is to “curate” an exciting Long Wharf season in which I’ve taken into account the mitigating factors in a way the audience doesn’t notice. The Fantasticks was chosen particularly for the director [Amanda Denhart] and her set designer and the delightful and inspiring way they’ll reimagine this chestnut.

Independent: I know the Long Wharf and Athol Fugard [at right in photo] have a long relationship, and last season’s Coming Home was, like this season’s offering, a world premier Fugard, which you also will be directing. Anything special to note in it?

GE: [Have You Seen Us? is Fugard’s] first play set in America, and his first Jewish characters.

Independent: And playwright Darci Picoult’s Lil’s 90th?

GE: It came to me through two actors, Lois Smith and David Margulies. He was in The Price. It will be a brilliant slice of life, impact of Alzheimer’s on a family. [The next, Sylvia by A.R. Gurney, was] written by one of my favorite playwrights whom I love, one of his most delicious early comedies.

Independent: And, finally, the play preceding the Ibsen, No Child …, the solo piece by Nilaja Sun? [ The title is a riff on No Child Left Behind; the play is set in an NYC public school.]

GE: A tour de force of performance and storytelling.

Independent: Is there a kind of Long Wharf theatrical tradition that each season, regardless of its unique challenges, you try always to uphold?

GE: I’m mindful of Long Wharf’s values: Acting at its best; not trying to overproduce a show with too much flash; and an abiding love and respect for the playwright’s word

Independent: Getting back to the challenges of adaptation re: A Doll’s House, you’ve spoken of the distinction that Robert Brustein makes between adaptation that’s simile and metaphor. I mean for your upcoming A Doll’s House, could you imagine, for example, Nora’s famous feminist door-slamming exit at the play’s end becoming a kind of slapping down of her laptop?

GE: No, no! If it’s a great work, too much equivalence robs the play of its resonance. If everything equals something else, it becomes earthbound.

Independent: So you won’t tell me anything more about your Ibsen?

GE: I’ll be working on it till the day it opens.