While it’s always a little sad to feel the days get shorter, I’m ready for an Angry Ibsen Autumn. Despite ups and downs in the productions themselves, it’s been exciting to see the old Norwegian lion roaring from various New York stages in the past couple of years. Even the cool kids of Hollywood are getting in on the trend, and why not? At just shy of 200 years old, Henrik Ibsen feels like a writer for the moment — full of passionate intensity, yet just as fiery in his skepticism and self-critique as in his moral conviction; grand and unsparing and perverse; equipped with an internal Geiger counter for sanctimony and bullshit. And while A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler tend to come around often enough in the contemporary theater, it’s not every day a girl gets to see The Wild Duck.
That’s a shame, because the play is an absolute barn burner. Weird and ferocious, very funny and brutally tragic, somehow both sardonic and mysterious, melodramatic yet deeply moving, it marks a turning point in Ibsen’s writing. Before it came the epic early works, Brand and Peer Gynt, and what critics often call the “social plays” like A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People. In its wake, things would get stranger and murkier, intentionally so. After An Enemy of the People, Ibsen got fed up with a public that essentially equated him with that play’s hero, Dr. Stockmann, the unbending idealist who calls out community corruption and has his life torn apart for it. So, in The Wild Duck, the playwright pulled a hard u-turn: He made the idealist the villain. Instead of becoming an innocent target, the play’s great defender of truth leaves blood and chaos in his wake. He’s a human wrecking ball — morally, a would-be Pygmalion who’s actually a Dr. Frankenstein.
Though Simon Godwin’s production at Theatre for a New Audience is a mixed bag — especially in its first half, where it fails to establish a strong point of view out of the gate — it does ultimately succeed in lighting Ibsen’s long fuse and following the rolling spark all the way to the inevitable bang. There’s something to be said for getting out of a play’s way, and after intermission Godwin does just that: His ensemble is clearly amped to get to the crazy, nasty, bizarre, and eerily beautiful meat of the thing, and in the final two of the play’s five acts, Godwin really lets them sink their teeth in. Nick Westrate is particularly on point as the fussy, self-pitying Hjalmar Ekdal, a man who probably could have made it to the final judgment with at least a C+ as a human being if his friend Gregers Werle (a compellingly severe Alexander Hurt) hadn’t come along and turned him into an all-out monster. Meanwhile, as Hjalmar’s 14-year-old daughter, Hedvig, the elfin Maaike Laanstra-Corn is delivering yet another wonderfully eccentric embodiment of a high-strung tween with a potentially perilous excess of imagination. It’s a tough and crucial part: We’ve got to buy the character’s sheltered naïveté and extremes of emotion, which can veer toward cutesy, but also her moments of a kind of lucidity that the play’s adults (or at least its men) rarely if ever access. “What a peculiar thing to say that he wanted to be a dog,” says Hjalmar’s wife, Gina (Melanie Field), after her husband’s friend Gregers has made a loaded comment to that effect. “I think he meant something else by it,” says Laanstra-Corn’s Hedvig, with exactly the right blend of childlike bluntness and nascent perspicacity. “I think he meant something else by what he was saying all the time.”
Hedvig identifies the tendency in her father’s friend that will ultimately lead them all off a cliff: Gregers is hellbent on meaning, determined to convert a messy world into crystalline symbols and signs and equally adamant about stripping human lives of messiness — even if it means bulldozing their foundations in the process. Relling (Matthew Saldívar) — a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals, and who provides the acerbic realist foil to Gregers’s belief in “the claim of the ideal” — diagnoses him mercilessly. Gregers, Relling tells Gina, suffers from “an acute condition — a fever. It’s called Chronic Righteousness … It’s a national disease.”
Godwin has chosen David Eldridge’s version of the play, which premiered 20 years ago at the Donmar Warehouse and has undergone a bit of zhuzhing prior to this production. It’s succinct and straightforward, perhaps at times a bit too much so. Though Eldridge ensures that the text is free of 19th-century curlicues, he also sands down some of its personality, most especially when it comes to Gina. Ibsen’s play is, among many things, about class: Gregers, heir to the timber business of his wealthy father, Håkon Werle (Robert Stanton), attaches himself to the family of his college buddy Hjalmar because he knows that they’ve been wronged. Hjalmar’s father, Old Ekdal (an excellent David Patrick Kelly), used to be the timber king’s partner before he took the fall for some of their shady business dealings. Ever since then, the Ekdals have lived hand-to-mouth, bolstered by Håkon’s charity. Isn’t it lovely, after all, that Old Werle set Hjalmar up with a photography business and introduced him to the woman he’d marry … who used to keep house for the Werles and who, it’s rumored, the master himself had an eye for?
In the Norwegian text Gina’s speech is noticeably less educated than that of Hjalmar and Gregers. It’s a tricky thing to render in translation, and modern writers tend to try to do it by way of dialect or malapropisms. Eldridge, however, has eliminated the distinction entirely, and it’s a loss. One gets the sense of a male playwright feeling uncomfortable about the possibility of making a female character look undignified — but Ibsen’s own satire gets us past that. Gina may be a former servant without much schooling, but it’s the college boys in her life who are all too clearly the idiots. Hjalmar—a beacon of mediocrity who’s “always been considered a genius within his circle”—condescends to his wife, passive aggressively holding her class over her while Gina manipulates him with beer and sandwiches and, with a little flattery and misdirection, runs the house as she sees fit. Here, Field doesn’t get to play with as many dimensions of Gina’s being, which renders the character less forceful than it should be. It’s Westrate’s increasingly insufferable Hjalmar, by contrast, who feels most powerfully drawn. Metamorphing from a seemingly reasonable man into a flailing, whinging monstrosity, Westrate gets the audience over the hump of learning to laugh at the character as well as wince at him — it’s an important hurdle in a modern Ibsen production. We need a firm handshake, an invitation to embrace the full intensity and variety of the play’s tone, or we’re apt to begin these things too polite.
That’s certainly the issue at the top of Godwin’s production. He’s kept the setting in 1880s Norway and added few textural flourishes—between scenes, Alexander Sovronsky plays snatches of Norwegian music on, among other instruments, the unmistakable Hardanger fiddle—and for a while, you can sense a restlessness in the audience, an uncertainty over how straitlaced this whole affair is going to be. (I kept thinking of this evergreen Onion article.) The wobbly beginning isn’t helped by the fact that Andrew Boyce’s scenic design doesn’t quite solve the puzzle that Ibsen’s play presents: Only the first act of The Wild Duck occurs in the grand house of the Werles. The rest unfolds in the Ekdals’ humble apartment, which contains a mysterious third space, the attic where the duck of the title lives. Always taking aim at himself along with his characters, Ibsen also loved a symbol, and that attic—which Hjalmar and old Ekdal have stocked with spindly pine trees, rabbits, and pigeons so that the disgraced old man, formerly a “fierce hunter,” can have a walk in the woods every now and then—is the vast wilderness, both literal and spiritual, hovering just outside the bounds of the play. “The forest gets its revenge, you know,” murmurs Old Ekdal in Twin Peaks tones. So, how to represent three spaces, first big-and-real, then small-and-real, then realistically small but imaginatively limitless?
Godwin and Boyce don’t explore the possibilities. Instead, they do what makes the most practical sense: They conceal the Ekdals’ home behind a couple of wall flats, backing a thin stretch of forestage where some green velvet sofas and oil lamps do their part as the Werles’ mansion. Then they simply leave the magical attic forever hidden. (Its door, up some stairs on a landing at the back of the set, must lead to a tiny backstage balcony — the actors have to squidge their way in and out every time.) These choices aren’t just a missed opportunity when it comes to expanding upon the play’s rippling currents of mystery; they also create dissonance in terms of the characters’ circumstances. The Ekdals are poor and the Werles fabulously rich: The wrong family’s home takes up the whole stage. The claustrophobia and lack of privacy that help to add heft and velocity to the story’s gathering snowball of disaster can’t be sufficiently accessed.
But then there’s that shriek Laanstra-Corn lets out when she thinks her father might kill the wild duck, or the way her jaw keeps wobbling even after she’s done crying — a babyish gesture that’s keenly observed and marvelously unsettling. There’s the moment Stanton’s Håkon Werle pinches the back of his son’s neck, like a cruel master bringing his dog to heel. (The bulk of Stanton’s performance feels far too benign; only in this instant does the character’s menace flash out.) There’s Mahira Kakkar’s sparkling, savvy turn as Mrs. Sørby, the housekeeper about to secure her place as the next Mrs. Werle — or the haunting image of Old Ekdal in his old military array, eyes glazed over as he marches up the stairs toward the attic to pretend he’s still hunting bears. There’s Ibsen, funny and frightening, still making himself heard. Even in an uneven production, it’s a thrill to see The Wild Duck spread its wings.
The Wild Duck is at Theatre for a New Audience through September 28.
Related
- Ibsen, Translated Into American: An Enemy of the People
- Gut-Renovating A Doll’s House With Jessica Chastain
At TFANA, a production that starts off too tamely but gradually finds the play’s explosive power.
