Hilton Als: Ibsen's "The Master Builder," at BAM: The New Yorker Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the title character of Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play "The Master Builder," is a portrait of something, but of what? To say simply that the aging, legendary, but still competitive architect embodies cold determination and raging avarice is to ignore the ways in which Solness shape-shifts in the play's atmosphere of supernatural realism. For at least half the drama, Solness is his own most interesting idea. He wants to be more than a man, but not a god - that would mean that he wasn't part of the action. When Solness, who is unhappily married, becomes bewitched by an uncanny young woman named Hilde Wangel, we learn something else about him: within his desire, he is a perverse, lovesick, liminal being. As played in the current revival (at BAM's Harvey Theatre) by the perceptive and receptive John Turturro, Solness is many things at once, although he tries not to be: he represses much of his character in order to become a successful brand - the master architect - in the eyes of a public that's more fascinated by the myth of heroic male creativity than by its complicated, internal reality. Solness's staff have experienced his hardness as well as his ambivalence, and they know both to be dangerous. We meet them during a moment of discord, on Santo Loquasto's lean, graphic, if perhaps too obviously architectural set. Knut Brovik (Julian Gamble), who was once a builder in his own right, would like to have a word with his employer about his son, Ragnar (Max Gordon Moore), who works at the firm as a draftsman. For a time, Knut was at the top of his profession; now he spends his days sketching out his former protégé"s concepts. He is too sick and defeated to do much about his own life, so he lives for his son's ambitions. Momentarily energized by bitterness and self-righteousness - "You pushed me off my perch. . . . You were lucky" - Knut tells Solness that Ragnar is too gifted not to execute his own projects. Couldn't the successful Solness pass along a commission - designing a family home - which he claims not to care about? Ragnar has already drawn up plans, and the clients are on board, if Solness will sign off on the project. "They really liked his thinking," Knut tells his boss. They thought it was original and fresh. Solness replies, "Oh, as opposed to my thinking? Old-fashioned? Passé? The play's director, the Romanian-born Andrei Belgrader, has an interest in bodies and scale. The smaller, weaker Knut doesn't shrink away from the taller, more vibrant Solness during this exchange. Rather, Turturro draws himself up to his full height and beyond, studying his interlocutor as if through an invisible lorgnette. . . .