'Through a Glass Darkly' off-Broadway

Although most of the world knows Ingmar Bergman through his movies, New Yorkers had the privilege of sharing another visceral part of his vision through regular visits to Brooklyn Academy of Music from his Swedish company, the Royal Dramatic Theatre. And when Bergman died four years ago, it seemed we would never again feel the devastation and elation of his profoundly moving theater.

So call it a kind of miracle to find "Through a Glass Darkly" -- a new, audacious yet faithful 90-minute adaptation of his 1961 psychological film classic. More character study than extended story, the drama throbs with the erotic and intellectual weight of Bergman's own work, while the tiny New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village almost lets us feel the intimacy of his camera close-ups.

This staggering and intense production has been staged by British director David Leveaux, far from the Broadway vastness that threatened to swallow his "Arcadia" this season.

In the center of it all is Carey Mulligan, the marvelous young English actress whose presence and kaleidoscopic emotional range were seen on Broadway in "The Seagull" in 2008 and in the 2009 movie, "An Education."

What a performance this is. She plays Karin, recently released from a mental sanitarium for hereditary schizophrenia, desperately trying to make her morose family happy on a vacation on an isolated Swedish island. Mulligan has such an apparent sweetness, such an unforced girlishness about her that, when the demons start calling, she magnetically pulls us down the abyss with her. Have dimples ever looked so sad?

In fact, what performances they all are -- Chris Sarandon as her chilly, narcissistic author-father; Jason Butler Harner as her adoring, confused doctor-husband; Ben Rosenfield as her teenage brother in the throes of artistic ambition and conflicted hormones.

It all plays out like chamber music, duets and trios that tell us everything we need to know in brief scenes. The set, by Takeshi Kata, simply evokes the gray windswept beach, the bedroom with the thin walls and the mystical pull of Karin's alternate reality.

The production is by the Atlantic Theater Company, dislodged as its Chelsea home is renovated. Although the play, adapted by Jenny Worton, deserves a large audience, it would be a shame to expand this jewel for a bigger space.