A Double 'Hedda': uneven but inspired Ibsen

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Hedda Gabler (Marisa Matarazzo, SM '99) watches as Judge Brack (David Tittle, MC '99) puts a gun to his hedda

Pity Marisa Matarazzo, SM '99. This weekend at the Whitney Humanities Center, she will take on one of the most complex, unsympathetic female protagonists in all of drama. Pity her. But not for lack of talent.

It's only in the third act of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, directed by Theater Studies DUS David Krasner, that her luminous, self-destructive Hedda truly makes sense. As she tears apart the manuscript of a lost lover and throws it into the fire, literally beating her fists against the ground in agony, it becomes clear that her frustration is two-fold: not only as a character locked out of love, but as an actress searching for a way to make her role sympathetic. It's the scene that literally makes the play.

Until then, Hedda is rough going. As the aristocratic daughter of a general, Hedda Gabler is transplanted into the petit bourgeois mediocrity of George Tesman (Vayu O'Donnell, DC '99), a would-be professor researching "handicrafts in medieval Brabant." Like most academics, George is painfully myopic, obsessed with his dreadful research and equally dreadful Aunt Juliana (Roya Shanks, BK '00), all the while neglecting his young wife.

What's a girl to do? Turn to worldly Judge Brack (David Tittle, MC '99) for amusement, and maybe sex, or mix herself up with the doomed romance between neglected school chum Thea Elvsted (Kristen Kenney, JE '99) and reformed ne'er-do-well Eilert Loevberg (Ben Gregory, MC '99). Yet, even these distractions cannot save Hedda from her unfortunate fate--"boring myself to death." When the pistols come out, it seems that her claim will be made literal.

Hedda Gabler is about a lot: the pointlessness of material existence; the end of aristocracy and the emergence of bourgeois values; the hopelessness of stifling gender roles; the impossibility of true passion in a world of petty romance. But it all depends on Hedda, as the lodestone--wholly shrewish or ultimately pitiable--that guides our interpretation of the play.

And it takes an awfully long time for her to figure that out. For most of the play, Matarazzo is entirely unsympathetic, with an inflection somewhere between a gun moll and a burlesque girl, and a playful deviousness that makes it look like she's enjoying herself far too much to break out the pistols. Shanks' Aunt Julia is simply a bourgeois foil when she comes near Hedda's ironic pincers. O'Donnell, meanwhile, in a brilliant comic turn that steals the show, is more blissfully innocent than ignorant in direct contrast to the unforgiving nastiness of Hedda.

Matarazzo chews scenery so well particularly when paired with O'Donnell, that she seems as if she is from another play entirely--a prescient Lady Macbeth, escaped into a comedic world where none of the pastoral shepherds are quick enough to catch on to her schemes. Her outbreaks of anger seem more like unexplained temporary insanity than desperate claustrophobia.

The other actors simply get lost behind her. Gregory, for instance, as Hedda's lost love and hope of true liberation, needs to beam, at first, like some harbinger of freedom from polite society. Instead, he comes across like a high school Casanova, stroking her shoulders with an accidental fumbling as if he were trying to undo her bra in the back seat of his mom's car. Kinney is terrified and taciturn--wholly suited to her role, but she is overpowered by all the noise. Only Tittle's Brack holds his head above the Hedda/George flood with calm dignity.

Then, something wonderful happens: Matarazzo finds Hedda's soul. Through a performance that depends less on the text than on a directorial gamble, Krasner suggests that Hedda not only feels enslaved by the tyranny of bourgeois morals and insipid middle class romance; she also wants to access it herself. When Gregory's Eilert returns in the third act, his performance is perfect because it is altered by Hedda's perception: he seems more self-assured, imbued with the possibility of liberation. She wants Eilert to love her, not Thea. When he doesn't, Hedda wants to destroy them and herself.

The second half explodes Hedda's facade of meanness into uncontainable emotion, and the play from a stilted exercise in "performing Ibsen" to a full-blown psychological study. Hedda is more man than woman in the late Victorian world, and more prophet than anything else. She believes that love should not be confined to one person, and that bourgeois society is intensely hypocritical, but she is thwarted by the constraining ethos of her times. Hedda is both angry and frustrated at the loss of pride and authenticity in her life. But she wants to be happy, and her inability to accept the futile bathos of the other characters kills her.

A terrific translation from the Norwegian by Lars A. Hellebust avoids the forced "British" feel of many vesrsions and brings across the character's emotions beautifully, with only a few awkward anachronisms--I doubt anyone wearing Candace Chen's period costumes would talk about "stag parties" or love sounding too "gooey."

Hedda Gabler is a production that starts out conventional and ends up exceptional. When Hedda says "I don't believe in vine leaves anymore," in the last act, she forecasts her spiritual demise with a powerful elegance that makes the moment worth the wait. If only we'd seen it coming.

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