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Does August Strindberg's boiling, behind-the-scenes hatred of women make the plays he wrote too hot to handle directly?

That's the feeling you get at this year's Master Playwright Festival, where the controversial Swedish playwright both is and isn't the man of the hour.

Strindberg is the first pre-20th-century playwright to be honoured at Winnipeg's winter drama-a-thon, an inclusive Fringe-like festival of productions professional and not-so-professional that has previously feted the likes of David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill (all of whom owe Strindberg a large debt).

On the surface, this edition's 17 plays and two readings make the playwright of such stylistically diverse and influential works as Miss Julie and The Ghost Sonata the most popular choice in the festival's 11-year history.

At the same time, however, it's difficult to find any undistilled Strindberg at StrindbergFest. The relatively straight translations are outnumbered by adaptations, "re-imaginings" and entirely new plays based on his life or work. There's even an outright parody - Play Strindberg, which (tiresomely) mocks his brilliant but bleak two-part drama of marital strife, The Dance of Death.

While Strindberg's cynical view of relationships between the sexes in his plays may be a bitter pill - "Love between a man and woman is war," is one of his more memorable aphorisms - it's downright impossible to swallow his self-proclaimed misogyny offstage.

Even when seeming to soften his stance, the crusader against women's rights didn't really do so. "Actually, my misogyny is entirely theoretical," Strindberg wrote to Danish editor and politician Edvard Brandes in 1887, "and I can't live a day without supposing that I warm my soul at the flame of their unconscious, vegetable way of life."

And yet, like so many artists, Strindberg's wrong-headed views didn't stop him from creating wonderful art; his first great trio of naturalistic dramas - The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors, all of which are getting strong productions at StrindbergFest - were even fuelled by them.

Written in 1887 and 1888, Strindberg viewed these works as weapons in a fight against the "bluestockings" and return fire against fellow Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen's plays such as A Doll's House (1881), which he felt were unsympathetic toward men.

"Just blame everything on [men]" he grumbled to Brandes, in a reactionary angry-man rant you might read in the blogosphere today, "blacken their names, tread them in the mud so that they haven't a square inch left clean - that makes for good theatre!"

Though Strindberg despised Ibsen, the father of modern drama had more complex feelings towards the younger artist who followed in his naturalistic footsteps; he had a painting of Strindberg hung above his desk and declared, "I am now not able to write a word without having that madman staring down at me."

Similarly, though Strindberg wrote off women as part of a different food group, theatre artists of the opposite sex have lived up to their reputation as the fairer one; they continue to be fruitfully inspired by him, as StrindbergFest attests.

For the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre - one of the gutsier theatre companies in Canada - Toronto-based playwright Julie Tepperman has written an incendiary "re-imagining" of Strindberg's The Father that is her strongest play to date.

A psychological thriller of sorts, the original depicts the henpecked Captain's descent into madness during a power struggle with his manipulative wife. In Tepperman's "re-imagining" with a smaller cast, secular Jewish psychiatrist Adam (Arne MacPherson) and Laura (Miriam Smith), who has recently become intensely religious, fight over the education of their daughter. The drama gets progressively darker as Adam loses custody of his child - and his sanity - thanks to the scorched-earth tactics waged by his wife.

By giving Laura greater psychological motivation for her actions (but making her no less unlikable), Tepperman has strengthened this tale that the thrice-married Strindberg based, as with all his works, on paranoid exaggerations of his own personal life.

Both university companies in StrindbergFest are also using female-filtered versions of Strindberg's plays from the later, expressionist and symbolist period that came after his mental breakdown in the mid-1890s. The University of Manitoba's Black Hole Theatre Company is staging 1901's A Dream Play rewritten by past master playwright Caryl Churchill, while the University of Winnipeg is putting on Elizabeth Sprigge's translation of 1907's The Ghost Sonata.

The former, in which the daughter of God descends to Earth to learn about the plight of humankind, is quite the wonder thanks to the puppet-making skills of graduate student Tim Bandfield; he illustrates Strindberg's stream-of-unconsciousness story with an inventive assortment of inanimate characters from tiny angels that dangle from wires to a Shrek-like giant who dwarfs the humans onstage.

By the time of A Dream Play, Strindberg's anger at women had given way to more equally distributed exasperation with the human race, tempered with (as he described it himself) "an undertone of melancholy and pity for all mortal beings." Indeed, all of his artistic output is more complex than evidenced by his cocky and polemical prefaces and letters. Though he was unsettled by women's independence, Strindberg married three independent actresses and wrote some of his most fascinating early characters - such as Miss Julie or the writer Tekla in Creditors - for them.

"It's terribly hard to be married ... harder than anything else. I think you have to be an angel, " he writes in A Dream Play. Amid his ramblings and rants, Strindberg's plays are full of such rueful wisdom, even if we're afraid to let them speak it to us directly these days.

Winnipeg's Master Playwright Festival continues until Sunday Feb. 6.

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