Theater Review - Marathon man

Henrik Ibsen is best known as a dramatist of domesticity.

The Norwegian playwright blazed trails in social realism through the parlors and drawing rooms of Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House and similar plays. But Ibsen didn’t spend his entire time indoors: His sprawling satire, Peer Gynt, ranges over Norwegian mountains, across African deserts, over raging seas and even into the subterranean realm of the trolls.

Famously difficult to stage, Peer Gynt gets a low-tech, high-energy treatment from PushPush Theater, placing the five-hour show on the shoulders of five actors. Patrons can attend the play over two successive nights or all on a single weekend night (with a “dinner break” between the two halves).

With musical interludes, audience interaction and bits of rhyming dialogue that give the show the vibe of a 1960s “happening,” the production could easily be staged in the open air, perhaps on a campus green or a downtown street corner. Director Jim Peck and his quintet of young performers bring to Peer Gynt high spirits and an admirable willingness to do apparently anything. But taking a casually comic approach to such a strange, singular play yields — not surprisingly — an inconsistent and eccentric experience, with at least as many tedious stretches as inspired ones.

Daniel Pettrow plays Peer Gynt, a figure from Norwegian folklore, known as a shiftless ne’er-do-well and a teller of tall tales. The play’s most lyrical scene may be its first, when Peer tells his mother (Michelle McCullough) a whopper about hunting — then riding — a wild stag: Peer and his steed end up rushing off a cliff, falling through a cloud, through a flock of birds and into a lake.

Cast out of his home village for his brawling, lying ways, Peer sets out on his own, despite the love of honest Solveig (Jessie Andary). Over the course of his life, Peer tries his hands at such occupations as wandering scholar, slave merchant, false prophet and, briefly, heir to the troll kingdom. He meets the incarnation of death (McCullough), the devil (Nathan Mobley) and supernatural creatures with names like “The Boyg” and “Threadballs.”

An epic work that reminds modern audiences of everything from Tolkein to The Odyssey to Everyman, Peer Gynt gets an irreverent treatment from PushPush, which has replaced its folding chairs with lounge-style seats. When the cast enters at the beginning of Act I, they carry bottles of water, chat among themselves and tell the stage manager to turn off his cell phone before getting into character. Audience members may be brought in to dance in the wedding scene or untie Peer when he’s been bound and robbed.

Peck’s Peer can be amusingly inventive: When Peer enters the troll kingdom, Sweeney plays on the electric guitar “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the tune from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt opera (which Peter Lorre memorably whistles in M). With many roles and only minor costume changes, the actors can take on different characters in peculiar ways. As the Troll King, Mobley has a Southern accent, a white towel around his neck and a whistle, like a plantation owner serving as a lifeguard.

Over the course of two nights, the play includes lovely moments, like Peer telling a story to his dying mother and virtually ushering her into heaven. The fourth act begins with an effective shipwreck scene — with dim lighting and off-stage actors making storm-at-sea whooshing sounds-- in which Peer learns some hard lessons about treasuring the lives of others.

But too many times the production doesn’t match that level of ingenuity, offering long, flat stretches as in the final half-hour. Sometimes you can appreciate the labor that’s gone into the acting, without finding it especially funny: At one point, Sweeney plays four of Peer’s traveling companions, alternating European accents and rushing from mark to mark, which you admire as a workout without laughing much.

Pettrow’s performance is a decathlon that has him rushing to all corners of the set, dueling, dancing, romancing, railing at the Lord and even eating a raw onion. Some of his speeches have repetitious rings, and he doesn’t really replicate Peer’s advancing age, but Pettrow gives the role such commitment that he contradicts the claims of Peer’s weak character.

A year ago, Theater Emory staged another two-part production, George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, which, like Peer Gynt, is another seldom-produced show. It may be that these plays are so rarely staged not so much for their length as for their sheer weirdness, which makes it difficult to connect with them on emotional levels. PushPush’s Peer Gynt proves a one-of-a-kind production that puts a boldly idiosyncratic stamp on a wildly imaginative work. But if I said it was a show for everybody, I’d be lying.

Peer Gynt plays through Oct. 7 at PushPush Theater, 1123 Zonolite Road, Suite 3. Tues.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m. and Sat.-Sun. at 5 p.m. $35. 404-892-7876. www.pushpushtheater.com.??