Failures of an Artist

It all began when Swedish director and playwright Marcus Lindeen set out to do what many like him had probably done before: adapt an Ingmar Bergman film script into a play. But during early research, Lindeen noticed a cryptic remark by Bergman in the script for an unmade film entitled, “Love Without Lovers.” Like many others that never left the written page, Bergman sentenced this script to live forever in what he called an “archive of unrealized visions and dreams.” Suitably intrigued, Lindeen set out to see if such an archive actually existed, and really, to discover what other treasures might be lurking there. He found it, and unearthed a world of unrealized scripts. Lindeen’s own project then shifted focus, and he aspired to create a play distilled from allof Bergman’s perceived failures. In a sort of meta-lesson from the great director himself, Lindeen began to deconstruct an anatomy of these so-called failures, which informed the production of his own play and his conception of the creative process more generally. In his charming and quirky telling, Lindeen is reminded of the age-old lesson that you must nearly always fail (sometimes often) in order to succeed.