Ibsen’s hard-to-perform poem is a folklore-inflected picaresque, containing 40 scenes about a ne’er-do-well who travels the wide world avoiding responsibility (he dabbles in the slave trade, starts a shady church, impregnates a Troll maiden, etc.) only to return home to his long-suffering love Solveig, whose forgiveness saves him. Eno hasn’t done a close adaptation he’s taken more liberties than not, and he needles the excesses of the original. Long before the production was paused, Gnit was walking hand-in-hand with another world-the one in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 verse play Peer Gynt. How did we get here? How much time has gone by? Gnit may not have been about a pandemic when it closed, but it certainly is now that it’s open. For its entire two-hour length and for a while thereafter, it’s disorienting, making you feel as though you’ve just woken up. What’s strange about the show, now resuscitated after its long hiatus, is that a Rip Van Winkle air still hangs around it. Bad things happen in fairy tales at night, I thought. In the grainy cell phone picture, the theater’s ghost light made Kimie Nishikawa’s design look eerie and moonlit: a shadowy valley with two hills of mossy greenery rising sharply right and left, a painted backdrop, and a storybook wooden house. When the shutdown order came, Will Eno’s existential comedy had been only days from opening at Brooklyn’s Theater for a New Audience, so TFANA mothballed the whole production, leaving the set onstage.
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Last year, while researching productions that were on indefinite pause, I saw a picture of the Gnit set.
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From Gnit, at Theater for a New Audience.