Hedda, Get Your Gun.(Hedda Gabler)(Theater review)

"Hedda"--a name that means "strife"--was Henrik Ibsen's working title for his 1890 masterpiece (now in revival at the American Airlines, in a new adaptation by Christopher Shinn). To the first name, Ibsen added the surname of his character's military father, Gabler, a general whose portrait is meant to be visible on the set--an image of power that haunts his newlywed daughter's household and underscores Hedda's sense of her own powerlessness. "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife," Ibsen wrote. A beautiful aristocratic woman trapped by marriage in a bourgeois provincial Norwegian community, Hedda struggles to assert over her existence some of her father's command and control. (The only other physical vestige of him in the play is a pair of duelling pistols, with which Hedda is something of a quick draw.) "I want to have power over a human destiny," she says. "I have never had that. Not once in my life."

Strife is Hedda's fate; at first, it also seemed to be the play's--"Hedda Gabler" was the worst received of any of Ibsen's great works. "A horrid miscarriage of the imagination," "an ungrateful play," "one doubts whether reality can provide an example of Hedda Gabler," the press snarled. The playwright August Strindberg, who saw himself as the model for Ejlert Lovborg, a debauched but inspired writer, spat spiders at the play and its author, whom he called a "decrepit old troll." At a rehearsal of "Hedda Gabler" at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899, Chekhov exclaimed, "Look here, Ibsen is not a playwright." In fact, this profound play, in which Hedda's contradictory desires both compel her and are concealed from her, foreshadows Freud's notion of the unconscious. (Freud is said to have learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen's work.) "Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves," Ibsen said. He, like Freud, was an archeologist of the modern psyche, one of those visionaries, as Freud observed, whose findings "troubled the sleep of the world."

In this production, directed by Ian Rickson, we first see Hedda (Mary-Louise Parker) in her own troubled sleep, sprawled on a sofa, her face to the back wall, exposing part of her alabaster ass--a sort of "Rokeby Venus" with venom, whose bared backside hints at the nihilism to come. Rickson's stage picture is startling, but it skews Ibsen's game--what Henry James called the "demure preservation of the appearance of the usual in which we see him juggle with difficulty and danger." The playwright's stage directions call for a bright, well-ordered drawing room. Here, instead of light, there is dark; instead of order, there is clutter; instead of Hedda's father's portrait, there is a glazed mirror, which reflects only Hedda's alienated self; instead of the external space, Rickson shows us her internal one. The choice, it seems to me, is bold but wrong. It tilts the stakes from psychological perplexity to didactic melodrama. For a person as unhappy and hate-filled as Hedda, the villa's luxury, beauty, and comfort--Ibsen's stage directions emphasize the carpeting--are an awful oppression, perpetual reminders of what she lacks and, therefore, what she must attack and spoil. This opening robs both the character and the audience of an insight into her toxic envy.

Even before the first words are spoken, Hedda prowls around the crepuscular gloom like an infantile termagant throwing a moody; she kicks over chairs, yanks dustcovers off furniture, sweeps bouquets of flowers onto the floor. Fine-boned and wasp-waisted, Parker plays Hedda as an icy, eye-rolling, passive-aggressive bitch. She's as petulant as a cat, and just as unbiddable. In a moment of impetuous weakness, Hedda recently married an academic, Jorgen Tesman (Michael Cerveris), because "he pursued me so violently." Tesman is a boy-man, cosseted by his aunts as a child, and deluded about the wife whom he now lives to please. He is decent but absorbed in his writing--a tome on domestic crafts in Belgium and Holland in the Middle Ages--and emotionally clueless, completely unaware of the subversive cruelty that Hedda dishes out. (His credulity is part of what she despises about him.) The play opens on the day after their return from a six-month honeymoon. ("It was excruciating," Hedda confides.) Tesman's buoyancy about the future contrasts with Hedda's rueful vision of a lifetime of loveless boredom--a doom that seems all but guaranteed when Tesman learns that he'll have to compete with Hedda's former lover, Lovborg (Paul Sparks), once a drunken scapegrace and now a literary highflier, for the professorship and the salary that he thought were his. For ...