Hedda Gabler is on the boards at Stray Dog Theatre. It’s a sure winner for those who want something beyond the summer fluffies.
Yes, it’s a major work; the title character is considered one of the most important dramatic roles in theater. It’s the sort of story that American soap operas can only hope to achieve – in the sense that it’s immediately engaging to even the casual theater-goer, easy to get swept up in and takes the audience on a thrill ride of conflict and motive.
Hedda and husband Jorgen have just returned from a long honeymoon, a working trip for Jorgen, who’s an academic doing research on medieval handcrafts in a part of Belgium. There’s a house they’ve bought on the anticipated earnings from a professorship he’s seeking. He clearly adores her; she’s clearly interested in, well, almost anything else, like acquiring new things and entertaining in a spectacular fashion. Jorgen, obviously one of those fuzzy-minded eggheads, doesn’t realize this, perhaps because he’s almost always thinking about his work.
A guest, Thea, arrives; she was a former classmate of Hedda’s. She’s just left her much older husband because she’s fallen in love with Ejlert, a smart guy who’s had vague-at-first “problems” getting his life together. Turns out he’s just had a book published and it’s become quite a big deal. He’s even – oooh – up for the same professorship as Jorgen. Cue the dramatic music. And here comes Judge Brack, a neighbor whom both Hedda and Jorgen have known for a long time. Interestingly, he appears to know Hedda particularly well.
Things begin to heat up, and we’ve got a cast that can bring it to a boil. Hedda is Nicole Angeli, the smoldering, irritable, stirrer-up of trouble. Cue Foreigner singing “Cold as Ice”, because Angeli is that good, able to smolder and freeze almost simultaneously. Ben Ritchie’s Jorgen is a seriously nice guy, conscientious about pleasing his wife but totally out of it when it comes to how greedy, how restless, how manipulative she can be. Thea, Rachel Hanks, handles the complexities of being an old guy’s wife who’s fallen in love with a young, alcoholic intellectual without breaking a sweat – she’s so controlled it takes us a while to realize her pain. Ejlert, played by Stephen Peirick, has come to sobriety and has that feeling of being newly-minted which can mark said status, innocent and cynical at the same time. We’re never quite sure if he really loves Thea or he’s fallen in love with what she’s been able to help him do. The judge, John Reidy, in many ways is the most tightly closed character for much of the play, so obliging, so man-of-the-world, until he begins to let us see what’s going on under that top hat. Juliana, Jorgen’s elderly aunt, is Jan Niehoff, who sports another fine piece of headgear, and Suzanne Greenwald is Berte, the long-time maid who, of course, sees a lot.
This script is titled as a new adaptation by Jon Robin Baitz, and is often referred to as rather feminist. Yes, this was clearly a time when women had few alternatives beyond marriage, children and working with the church ladies, and of course Ibsen wrote about that quite a bit. Certainly Hedda is clearly looking for something more. Yes, she’s bored.
But she wants to be in control. Absolute control. In many ways she presents as having a personality disorder. She lacks empathy, she enjoys manipulating people, she’s gratuitously mean, and it’s her desires that are her prime motivation. She’s disgusted by the idea of being responsible for a child, because it should all be about her. Her social graces are by rote, and she barely manages to disguise her true feelings when she’s in sight of those around her – except the audience, who has a whale of a good time watching Angeli work the character. She’s mesmerizing. The fact that the rest of the cast can get us to look away from Hedda at times says a great deal about their abilities.
This is what director Gary Bell has given us, and it’s a corker. Miles Bledsoe’s home is lovely, Amy Hopkins costumes are nothing short of delicious, and Tyler Duenow’s lights give us windows and doors where there are none, as well as the passing of the long summer days at that latitude. Moreover, a particular tip of the hat to whoever chose the music, because (as is so often the case at Stray Dog), it’s perfect.
Good stuff.
Hedda Gabler
through June 23
Stray Dog Theatre
2336 Tennessee Ave.
314-865-1995