WASHINGTON, January 18, 2012 – It’s hard to believe, but the plays of path breaking modernist Henrik Ibsen are not often staged in the nation’s capital. Writing in the late 19th century, the Norwegian playwright dealt with what are still contemporary issues today in an astonishingly forthright manner. Corrupt politicians (Enemy of the People), STDs and their consequences (Ghosts), the institution of marriage vs. feminism and the patriarchy (A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler)—all these problems and more are grist for Ibsen’s mill, and none of his dramas have lost their relevance or their impact
But again, it’s rare to see Ibsen staged these days, except perhaps for the perennially popular and perennially relevant Enemy of the People, which frequently surfaces these days most often in community theater.
Hedda (Kerry Waters) tries to get a manuscript from George (Lee Ordeman). (Photo credits: Mason Summers.)
Happily, SCENA has chosen to break the ice in area professional theater in its new production of Hedda Gabler, now playing at the H St. Playhouse in Northeast DC. To shake things up a bit, director Robert McNamera chose to use Irish playwright Brian Friel’s inventive update of Ibsen’s 1890 original. In addition, he’s updated the action to the year 1938, adding a subtle dose of that decade’s “end of an era” eeriness to the dramatic recipe.
The result on opening weekend is a production that rambles on a bit at the outside but gathers force and speed as it heads for its nasty, almost nihilistic finale.
Hedda Gabler bears at least a superficial resemblance to Ibsen’s better-known Doll’s House. Both are revolve around unhappy marriages, and the focus of both ultimately settled on the wives rather than the husbands.
Understanding Hedda, however, is a little like excavating an archaeological dig, going down layer after layer in pursuit of the bedrock of truth. On the surface, Hedda (Kerry Waters) initially appears to be yet another spoiled, middle-class female with absurd upper-class pretensions. She expects her middling new husband, George Tesman (Lee Ordeman) to provide her with a lavish lifestyle regardless of the fact that he’s only a modestly paid junior college professor who may, in fact, not even have a permanent faculty position.
Opening Hedda’s mental kimono a bit more, however, exposes a desperate, unhappy woman whose past affairs come back to haunt her as well as the men she’s toyed with en route to fulfilling her delusions of grandeur. She searches constantly for a man in possession of talent, self-assurance, and the money that both can bring. But she also expects to control the outcome of her relationships—something ultimately not possible with the ideal alpha-male see seems to be seeking.
Lovborg (Eric Lucas) explaining his night out to Thea (Danielle Davy).
Life gets considerably more complicated for Hedda when one of her old flames, poet, philosopher, and town drunk Eilert Lovborg (Eric Lucas) re-enters the scene. Lovborg’s on the wagon now, courtesy of Thea (Danielle Davy), who’s essentially abandoned her own husband to save this proverbial starving artist. And save him she has, getting him off the bottle and helping him finish his magnum opus, which has won him considerable academic and popular fame. Of course, now Hedda wants him back.
Things are complicated even further by the appearance and reappearance of the sophisticated and highly amoral Judge Brack (Jim Jorgensen). A longtime political fixture in their town, the Judge is friends with both Hedda and her new husband. The latter seems thoroughly clueless, however, that Brack and Hedda might once have been extra special friends back in the day.
When Hedda, jealous of Thea’s new catch and wanting a piece of Lovborg’s newfound fame for her own, attempts to regain control of the author, she finally sets a serial catastrophe in motion—one from which there can be no escape.
By means of Friel’s somewhat freeform remodeling of Ibsen’s script and his own clever tweaks for this production, Robert McNamera has resurrected Hedda Gabler as a compelling, multi-tiered problem drama acutely attuned to our own era even though the production has been repositioned in time just prior to the catastrophe of the Second World War. In so doing, he creates a parallel between Hedda’s attempts to rewrite her own history and Germany’s attempt to reconstruct the outcome of WWI.
Also, a bit like Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier, the Ibsen-Friel-McNamera collective is using the drama’s characters as archetypes embodying aspects of a society that’s so corrupt it’s on the verge of collapse from within.
Last week’s opening night production started out a bit tentatively. Although they seemed comfortable in their parts, most cast members stumbled over their lines on occasion in the drama’s first half. Nervousness? Opening night jitters? It’s hard to say, although the problem seemed to disappear entirely after intermission.
Nonetheless, these minor glitches caused the first part of the play to drag a bit more than might otherwise have been the case. In fairness, Ibsen, like many late 19th century dramatists—and like even many British mini-series directors of today—takes his time initially to explore each character thoroughly before picking up the tempo and bringing on the chaos. That said, though, pacing up front in this production could have gone a bit more up-tempo without damage to the over-all concept.
Fortunately, the acting here was almost uniformly top-notch throughout. The play opens with a pair of minor characters who quite capably set the mood and tone. Rena Cherry Brown’s aging Aunt Julia is both dotty and canny, her sunny mood and lightness of tone concealing, initially at least, the iron, protective will that can and will defend her extended family against predators and other disagreeable types. Her defense of the family’s bumbling and faintly ridiculous maidservant Bertha (Mary Suib) gives us a clue of this early on.
Lee Ordeman’s George is a completely different take on the way this character is traditionally played. George is supposed to be obtuse and unintentionally clueless. But Ordeman takes these traits to another level, behaving at times like a manic-depressive whose manic switch is mainly stuck in the “on” position. At times, his moods are as exaggerated as those of John Cleese in a Monty Python skit. Oddly, though, this hyperactivity usually works, serving to further distance Tesman’s skewed reality from that of Hedda.
Eric Lucas portrays Hedda’s old flame Eilert Lovborg as a sullen, surprisingly fragile poet whose career trajectory bears strong parallels with both Edgar Allen Poe and Dylan Thomas. Overcoming alcoholism with Thea’s help, Lucas’ Eilert is able to achieve an intense 15 minutes of fame. But it doesn’t take much time for his old demons, with the jealous Hedda’s help, to bring him right down again.
Blustery yet weak in spirit, Lovborg would seem to be the perfect man for Hedda to own and manipulate, but the game has long been over and now it’s clearly too late.
On the other side of the Lovborg equation, Danielle Davy brings a refreshingly different appeal to the seemingly hapless Thea. Her ancient schoolgirl rivalry with Hedda comes again to the fore as the more powerful Hedda jealously attempts to wrest Thea’s prize—Lovborg—away for herself.
Thea, too, like Hedda, seems to want a controllable alpha-male for her own, and she’s actually succeeded, unlike her rival, which sets off a disastrous trip down an emotional road of no return.
As portrayed by Davy, however, this Thea possesses an essential goodness and naiveté that’s alien to her rival. But it proves to be an essential ingredient that permits Thea’s salvation as the play draws toward its close.
Kerry Waters presents Hedda as a ruthless, self-centered, cold-hearted monster from the outset, incapable of real human warmth and coldly calculating in her relationships with others. It is only as the play develops that we begin to develop some sympathy for this capable and determined woman of a past generation.
Perhaps today she’d have used her skills and aggression to climb to the top of a major corporation. But in times gone by, such a woman would find few outlets for this kind of personality. This, of course, forces Hedda to sublimate such need for control into a kind of predatory pre-feminism which actually dooms all her attempts at permanent relationships to fail.
It’s only in the second act of this production that we catch a glimpse of this more vulnerable Hedda. And it’s quite impressive that Waters is able to bring it out.
But perhaps the most effective and surprising portrayal in this production is Jim Jorgensen’s malevolent and frequently darkly comedic Judge Brack. Brack, as Hedda’s psychopathic male doppelganger, is clearly the real bad guy in this play. Lovborg is too weak, and Tesman is too clueless. Judge Brack, however, due in no small part to his very position in the legal system, is an expert in identifying and exploiting human weakness, at times to his own distinct benefit.
Jim Jorgensen's Judge Brack inspects Hedda's classic firearm collection.
The lanky Jorgensen plays Judge Brack like something of a cross between Oscar Wilde’s superficial but clever Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest and the snarky, malevolent presence of Christopher Lloyd’s evil Judge Doom in Disney’s 1988 live action/animation “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
The result is the most powerfully original performance in the play. Not only a fascinating study of evil in itself, Jorgensen’s take on Judge Brack is both the symbol and the embodiment of the narcissism that drives each of the characters in this play with the possible exception of Bertha.
Tesman obsesses over his twin fantasies of possessing a trophy wife and a trophy faculty appointment. Lovborg aspires to greatness but doesn’t want to do the work. Hedda and to a lesser extent Thea are trappers on the hunt for men who will do their bidding. And Aunt Julia, for all her proper demeanor, regards herself as sole arbiter of who’s officially on the family roster and who’s on the enemies list.
But it’s only Brack, in the end, who’s completely engaged. He has no real feelings, and as such, his is actually the kind of life force that all the other characters merely strive to achieve.
Philosophy aside, however, Jorgensen’s malevolent yet comic take on Judge Brack is a real eye opener, infusing this play with a powerful pulse that drives the action relentlessly forward. Helen Hayes Award nomination, anyone?
Rating: *** (Three stars.)
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