Shakespeare Theatre hunts down rarely performed "Wild Duck"

(L to R) Alexander Hurt (Gregers Werle) and Nick Westrate (Hjalmar Ekdal) in Ibsen's The Wild Duck at Shakespeare Theatre.
Photo: Gerry Goodstein

When a production of Henrik Ibsen's dark play The Wild Duck comes to a theater near you, you should go see it. Ibsen mined some of the complex relationships of his own family to explore the concept of the "life-lie," as it is described in the play. These personal illusions, which make life bearable for the people who hold them, are torn away repeatedly due to the self-righteous interference of a vengeful character named Gregers Werle. Shakespeare Theatre Company's production, directed by artistic director Simon Godwin and seen earlier this fall at Brooklyn's Theatre for a New Audience, made for a compelling evening in the theater at a viewing on Wednesday evening at the Klein Theatre. Fair warning: as the regular groans and sounds of outrage from the audience witnessed, this play, as adapted by David Eldridge, is not for the faint of heart.

The family at the heart of the play, the Ekdals, has a number of skeletons in the closet. Old Ekdal, played with eccentric mannerisms by David Patrick Kelly, was cheated by his former business partner, Håkon Werle, the head of a prosperous family among whom Ekdal's son, Hjalmar Ekdal, was raised. To expiate his sense of guilt, Håkon has given Old Ekdal a regular pension and supported Hjalmar financially so that he could start a career as a photographer and marry and have a family. He has even put a potential wife in Hjalmar's path, his one-time maid Gina, but to cover up his own indiscetion instead of being solely for Hjalmar's good. Håkon's son, Gregers, who has long resented his father and is now determined to rip away Håkon's pious falsehoods, destroys the lives of everyone in the process.

Alexander Hurt brought a steady, almost maniacally calm pacing to the disruptive character of Gregers, whose case of "virtue-fever," as one translation put it, drives him to all of his misguided honesty. (The cadence of Hurt's voice and his still stage presence did bring to mind at times the acting style of his famous father, William Hurt, a connection that is not mentioned in the program.) Nick Westrate's Hjalmar, a bundle of enthusiasm and self-delusion, impressed more than his Victor Frankenstein last season, while Melanie Field brought the same sort of long-suffering steadfastness to his wife, Gina, as she did with Sonya in Uncle Vanya. Robert Stanton made a tall, quite insufferable Håkon, realizing him as a man who cannot accept that his attempts to make things right, without really accepting fault, convince no one around him.

Maaike Laanstra-Corn gave Hedvig, Hjalmar and Gina's daughter, a convincing teenage awkwardness, although her emotional excesses in the play's tragic ending rang false at times. The versatile Matthew Saldivar proved an exemplary foil to the wrong-headed Gregers as Relling, the doctor who befriends Hjalmar and tries to see him through these troubles, while Mahira Kakkar's Mrs. Sørby (the housekeeper who will marry her employer) and Katie Broad's Petterson filled out the Werle household with self-serving smugness.

The scenic design (Andrew Boyce) and costumes (Heather C. Freedman) anchor the action in the play's original late 19th century of candles and oil lamps. An interesting aspect of Eldridge's adaptation is the character of Jensen, the hired waiter at the (truncated) opening dinner scene at the Werle household: Alexander Sovronsky, music director of the production, plays him as a violist who then strolls in and out between scenes to link the play together with musical excerpts, including pieces by Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, for atmospheric effect.

The Wild Duck runs through November 16. shakespearetheatre.org

For Your Consideration: 'A Master Builder'

Wallace Shawn (Master Builder Solness) and Lisa Joyce (Hilde) in A Master Builder

A Master Builder, directed by Jonathan Demme, W. Shawn

Jonathan Demme seems to be the new Louis Malle, in the sense that he has directed the latest collaboration of Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. The costars of My Dinner with André and Vanya on 42nd Street, both directed by Malle, are reunited in A Master Builder, Demme's new film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play Bygmester Solness (Master Builder Solness). The screenplay credit goes to Shawn, although the film is based on a stage production of the play created by Gregory, and the changes to the structure of the play are significant. Demme, who has not made a good feature movie since Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia in the 1990s, has directed an earnest and sometimes surprising version of this play, with a twist that transforms the plot from one about an old man ruined by a seductive woman to one about an old man who is saved by one (watch out for spoilers after the jump).

Shawn plays Halvard Solness, a highly regarded architect whose life is coming apart, as a mostly vile and petty egotist, blinded to anyone's concerns but his own. Everything in his life has gone wrong, ever since a fire burned down his wife's family home, in a way killing their three-week-old twin sons. At the same time, the tragedy boosted his career, for which Solness feels he is being punished: "I am being ground down into the dirt," he says at one point, "overpowered by guilt." He is cruel to his ailing colleague, Brovik (played with painful sincerity by Gregory), and his son who aspires to be an architect, keeping the son and his fiancée, with whom he is carrying on a not-so-secret affair, under his thumb. Into this situation comes a young woman, Hilde, who is a stand-in for the older Ibsen's infatuations with young women late in his life. She confronts Solness with his past, when he designed a building in her village and, at a celebration for the opening, treated her, then only a young girl, in a way that we might now describe as molestation.

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'Hedda Gabler' in Modern Oslo

The Nordic Cool festival is heating up at the Kennedy Center, and while we will be focusing mostly on the classical music events -- the National Symphony Orchestra's program with Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is this evening -- there are theater and dance events we would love to cover if there were more days in the week. One that fit into my schedule was the Wednesday performance of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, staged by the National Theater of Norway in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. What might have been a negative for some was actually a draw for me: the chance to hear the play (well, most of it) in the original Norwegian, with a supertitle machine providing an English translation.

Norwegian-American director Peer Perez Øian, in his updated adaptatation, has streamlined Ibsen's play, or gutted it, depending on your point of view. To get at the heart of the conflict, he has left intact only the five most important characters: gone is all mention of Jørgen's aunts (both Juliane and the never-seen invalid Rina), as well as the servant, Berta. Some of the content of Jørgen's dialogue with Juliane in the first act is contained in the most substantially altered portion of this adaptation, the introduction that situates the return of the newly married Tesmans -- Jørgen and Hedda -- from their extended honeymoon. Other than some slight altering of later lines, however -- instead of in photo albums, the honeymoon pictures were shown on a smartphone, for example -- most of the rest of the dialogue is straight from Ibsen. The only regrettable addition was the use of a turntable playing 60s tunes, with the characters dancing to it.

Other Articles: Peter Mark, From Oslo, a most eccentric ‘Hedda Gabler’ (Washington Post, February 28)

The updating -- especially the removal of Jørgen's extended family (his two aunts raised him when his parents died) and the convention of a house with servants -- allowed this production to be much more open about the sexual tension at the heart of the drama. Jørgen, played here by the handsome Mattis Herman Nyquist, was much less an obvious target for scorn, perhaps egotistical and less intellectually sharp but far from the vexing loser he is in some productions. Thea Elvsted (Tone Beate Mostraum, pretty but also fragile) and Ejlert Løvborg (lumbering, bestubbled Jørgen Langhelle) were on the same social level as the Gablers, just ruined by a bad marriage and drink. As Brack, the tall, bald Christian Greger Strøm seemed less a legal presence and more of an interloping neighbor, and all the performances were subtle, with volumes of meaning packed into each 'Yes', 'No', or 'Perhaps'.

When the actors were not involved in a scene, which took place on a revolving set with drops resembling parts of Oslo's National Theater itself, they were generally seated at the edges of the proscenium, observing the play. The approach made Hedda (played with an edge by K. Andrea Bræin Hovig, pictured above) -- one of the more complex women ever conceived for the stage -- even colder than she might otherwise be, beautiful, judgmental, cruel, willing to crush her husband's rival even while she is attracted to him, seemingly more than to her husband. One memorable moment came when Bræin Hovig, passing through the house, sat down on the arm of the seat directly in front of me. Perez Øian's direction added reflective moments to allow us to contemplate each degree of her betrayal, and how it leads to her own undoing, with Ejlert allowed to linger on the stage, a silent but condemning ghost.

The next major theater event in the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival will feature Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater in the U.S. premiere of Fanny and Alexander (March 7 to 9), a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Oscar-winning feature film. Many other theater events are also on the schedule.