As part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, The Fountainhead arrives via Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The company’s director, Ivo van Hove, was recently represented by two excellent Broadway revivals, A View From the Bridge and The Crucible. So it’s really no surprise that the production here is super-conceptualized, visually arresting and well acted. But the material is Ayn Rand. Having never read her work, I was not completely prepared for the bloated hyperbole here rendered in Dutch with English supertitles.
The Fountainhead’s protagonist is Howard Roark, an individualistic young architect who designs modernist buildings. He is unwilling to compromise on his art. The architectural establishment is unwilling to accept innovation. Mr. Roark is therefore presented as the ideal man and embodies Ms. Rand’s view that individualism is superior to collectivism. The result is a four hour diatribe of mind-numbingly self-righteous speeches and repetitive musings with dollops of nudity, sex and drinking.
At the core of this watchable bore is ultimately an overwrought soap opera. The woman who calculatingly sleeps around. The newspaper people who make or break careers. The not-so talented but more successful rival. And our “hero,” as self-important as his brilliant buildings. Thrown into this theatrical blender is a mix of endless philosophical musings about everything from capitalism, rape, socialism, conformity and individualism. From my seat, as an individual, I was happy when this relentlessly preachy story ended, unresolved and overlong. Perhaps collectivism, and editing, are not entirely bad things.