UPDATE: Due to a scheduling conflict, the March 26 and 27 shows of the Bebento Productions Inc./Daniel Gerroll show DR GLAS have been cancelled. The schedule goes on as planned March 28-29 at the Bloomfield Garfield Activity Center, 113 North Pacific Avenue. Times vary; visit https://pittsburghfringe.org/events/dr-glas/.
PITTSBURGH FRINGE FESTIVAL runs March 20-29, 2025, with more than 40 performances and exhibitions, at sites in Bloomfield, Friendship, Garfield and East Liberty, along Penn Avenue. Find the full slate of shows, venues and tickets at https://pittsburghfringe.org/ ).
By SHARON EBERSON
With hot-button topics including abortion, women’s rights, suicide, euthanasia and sexual obsession, it’s not surprising that the release of the book Doctor Glas created a scandal and its author was vilified by Swedish society, in 1905.
That was then. Today, the epistolary novel by Hjälmar Soderberg is revered in his native Sweden, and taught in schools.
“The book is a masterpiece. It’s only about 140 pages long, and everybody in Scandinavia knows it. It’s a high school textbook,” said stage and screen actor Daniel Gerroll, whose one-man show, DR GLAS, an English adaptation by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, is part of the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival.
Playing this month for four performances, March 26-29, at two Bloomfield-Garfield venues, DR GLAS is a solo performance that Gerroll has been performing at festivals and relatively tine venues worldwide.
The first time he performed the 60-minute, full-length version was in 2023, at a bar in Kyiv, for the Ukraine Inaugural Fringe Festival.
Gerroll, speaking via Zoom, gave a quick version of his experience in Ukraine, recounted in detail in an American Theatre Magazine article in September 2023. After a trial run in San Diego, he was looking for a place to premiere the full live version of DR GLAS when the opportunity to head to the war-torn country presented itself.
“I had thought, ‘What do I do to help that situation?’ I’m too old to fight and I don’t speak Ukrainian, although I tried to learn in case I went there as a volunteer. … The young lady who tried to teach me, I hired her as my assistant, and she and I arranged to join the Ukraine Fringe, the inaugural one in 2023. There was a group from Hong Kong, a guy from Washington, D.C., a lady from London, a lady from Switzerland – all extraordinary performers. Unlike so many fringes, it was all really astutely chosen and rather high quality.”
He performed the show “between air raids, at a famous bar where anarchists used to meet in the early 1900s, to a fabulous audience. And there were people watching with machine guns slung over their shoulder.”
Even if you don’t recognize his name, it’s likely you have seen Daniel Gerroll on stages or screens, big and small. The British-born actor made waves on the soap opera One Life to Live (as Dr. Wilhelm Klauss), among many TV roles that include the recurring character Stanley Birch on The Blacklist. He also played middle distance runner Henry Stallard in the 1981 Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, and can be seen in two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, on Disney+.
Gerroll’s trip to the Fringe Festival marks his second appearance in Pittsburgh – he was previously here in 2013, starring in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar at City Theatre.
Playing the fictional Dr. Glas has had Gerroll on the go, with the passion project that began eight years ago, playing small venues when and wherever time allows. He noted that his show is not the usual fare for fringe festivals, which more often provide a showcase for unconventional or experimental performing arts.
“I’m really looking forward to getting there again,” he said of coming to Pittsburgh. “They very sweetly offered to put me up, and, because I’ve got the Daredevil money in my pocket still, I said, ‘I’m sure there are going to be a lot of young people who really would benefit from staying. I said, ‘I’m going to a hotel.’ ”
DR GLAS, to the Pittsburgh Festival Fringe, March 26-29, 2025.
Versions of the novel as a play and a movie have been done previously, in other languages, and when it was suggested to Gerroll that he was the right man for an English-language version, he bought the rights to a translation of the novel. He turned to his friend, Hatcher, the prolific playwright whose popular works have been seen often in Pittsburgh.
Asking Hatcher to adapt the book into a play, Gerroll recounted the conversation that began, “ ‘So Jeff, this is great. I could talk to a lot of artistic directors, and I’ll tell them that there’s this rich, philosophical introvert …’ He said, ‘Stop! If you go into a room like that, they’re going to say, ‘’Excuse me, I just heard my house is on fire. I’m sorry, I have to leave.” ’ He said, ‘It is a psychological thriller,’ and he’s teased that out very successfully.”
As described in a review on CultureVulture.net, Dr. Glas is, “A principled, duty-bound man [who] takes a step out of his lane and loses his moral compass in the engrossing world premiere,” seen as a streaming production by North Coast Rep.
Gerroll, 73, finds endlessly compelling facets in the character of the brooding physician, who falls for the beautiful wife of an odious minister – an infatuation that sends him spiraling. The doctor’s inner monologue has given Gerroll pause to reflect as well.
“All of us, however much success or failure we have had in life, get to a point where you wonder whether, ‘Did life pass me by, or did I ride the train? Did I get on? Did I get up too soon? All those questions about, have you made the most of your life? And I guess – I don’t know whether this is sort of a spoiler in a way – but he realizes that by being such an acetic personality and so misanthropic, and yet a do-gooder as a doctor, he realizes that his nature has caused him to let life pass him by. And it hits me so hard, because I’ve tried so hard not to let life pass by,” Gerroll said, adding, “Doing this play is very much not letting life pass me by.”
Staying on that theme, after our Zoom conversation, the actor sent a message saying, “I was struck by something while watching the news,” which on March 20, 2025, included stories of ceasefire negotiations amid an ongoing war that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022.
“We are all wondering what we can to do stand up to what is going on in the country right now,” he wrote. “Glas is a person with strong convictions that go against social norms – he is pro-divorce, pro-abortion, pro-voluntary euthanasia, but he keeps his principles locked up inside himself and only when he comes alive in his infatuation for a special lady does he realise that by being silent, he has let life pass him by.
“I came to this,” he continued, “when asking myself the question we in the arts are always asked: ‘What good are we? Why are stories so important? Why should we support the arts? … A story might not take an issue head-on, but by following a parallel trail, we might end up where we want to be, or be made to think about it.”
The message brought into focus something he had said earlier, when asked about why he felt compelled to travel far and wide, portraying Dr. Glas.
“An element of this play that is very universal is he becomes, you could call it in love, but really he becomes infatuated with Helga Gregorius, and, I mean, I’ve been married happily for 40 years, but one of the fears one has, I suppose, is to be blindsided by some passion that you cannot control, that will actually draw you into the sort of ethical dilemma that he finds himself in.
“And so,” Gerroll concluded, “it is really hard to get tired of playing him.”
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