Doctor Glas: A Musical Play

Book & Lyrics by James Feinberg Music by Matthew Dylan Rose

Based on the 1905 novel by Hjalmar Söderberg

Based on the audacious 1905 novel by Swedish master Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas tells the story of Tyko Gabriel Glas, a profoundly lonely physician (and thirty-three-year-old virgin) in 1900 Stockholm. Glas’s most prominent patient is Reverend Gregorius, a self-satisfied old parson whom Glas instinctually detests.  Gregorius’s wife, Helga, is a beautiful young woman who fascinates Glas.  When Helga comes to Glas and confides that Gregorius will not cease his rapacious sexual attentions, which are loathsome to Helga, Glas agrees to use his authority as a doctor to prevent the hypochondriac old man from engaging in sex.  But this ruse only lasts so long, and Glas, who soon falls fully in love with Helga, is faced with the question of how far he is willing to go to “save” Helga from her husband – even if saving her drives her into the arms of her illicit suitor, the upwardly mobile civil servant Niklas Recke.

Told through Glas’s frantic journal entries and the language of northern European early-modern classical music, Doctor Glas is a pitch-dark examination of the frozen and terrified people at the margins of the human race.

Doctor Glas recently received a two week long developmental period and reading at NYU Steinhardt in 2022. A second reading was produced by Rose Caola in 2023.