Style over substance

NETC's Hedda Gabler is lost in last century

by Steve Vineberg

HEDDA GABLER By Henrik Ibsen. Translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed

by Michael McPhee. Set designed by Tom Saupé. Costumes by Eileen Rodgers. Lighting by Christopher Gates. With Aimée S. Bel, Adrian Hernandez, Steven Gould, Julian M. Broughton, Kelli Deliso, Ellen O'Neall Waite, and Claire Gregoire. A New England Theatre Company production, at Anna Maria College, Paxton, through March 27.

For a company of non-professionals to attempt Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is a noble folly. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's best-known play (with the obvious exception of A Doll's House, which NETC has already produced); and because of its profoundly alienated heroine, who pulls against the constraints of her society yet is wedded to them, it's the one that continues to feel most modern. Ibsen's first audiences -- he wrote the play in 1890 -- would have felt the shock of the play's content through the twisting of its form (melodrama): instead of supplying a comfortable denouement, he has the main character retreat into another room and point a gun to her temple. (Both A Doll's House and Ghosts, his two earliest realist works, play similar cruel tricks on the Victorian audience's expectations.) A century later, we may not respond to the formal surprises in Ibsen, but we still feel a jolt at the conclusion, and Hedda' s behavior still provokes argument. It's a great, unresolvable role for an actress, and the other figures, too -- her fastidious, scholarly husband Tesman, the elegantly manipulative Judge Brack, the unexpectedly strong-minded Thea Elvsted, and Eilert Lovborg, whose character becomes the battleground for these two women -- are dream roles for performers.

But the great modernist playwrights -- Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw -- present complicated problems of style for contemporary actors and directors. All four are realists, but their approach to language, milieu, and the revelation of characters are stylized; and the trick, especially for Americans, is to find a way to make their texts ours. Otherwise what you get is the heavy overlay of costume drama that can sink a production -- that uncomfortable feeling that the actors are putting all their dialogue in quotation marks. That's the problem that plagues Michael McPhee's production of Hedda Gabler. Several of the actors seem so conscious that they're working in another century that, with all good intentions, they stylize their performances out of recognition. This seems particularly unfortunate considering that McPhee and the costume designer, Eileen Rodgers, have wisely updated the play a couple of decades (though I'm not sure I understand the reason for McPhee's use of Bessie Smith at the start and Billie Holiday at the finish of the show).

The actors who demonstrate the most self-consciousness are Aimée S. Bel, who plays Hedda, and Adrian Hernandez as Tesman. Bel is physically perfect for the role -- she's a beautiful woman with poise and a strong presence, and it's easy to believe that every man in the room could have fallen in love with her. But she affects, on and off, an English accent that probably wouldn't be convincing even if she were doing a British play but certainly feels superfluous in a drama set in Norway. In the language of acting class, Bel plays attitudes, not objectives (or actions), which gives her performance a stilted quality. Most of the time her Hedda comes across as haughty, schoolmistressy, but Hedda's distaste for her husband's trivialities and her terror of scandal aren't just unpleasant qualities; they strike at the core of her being. Only a few times in the final act, in her obvious revulsion at the idea of bearing Tesman's child, does Bel convey a sense of the conflict in Hedda's soul. And Hernandez never lets us get even a peep at what's underneath the affectation: he plays Tesman as a caricature (with an indecipherable accent).

In less striking ways, both Julian M. Broughton as Brack and Steven Gould as Lovborg fall prey to the same problem, though Broughton does bring some charm to the role; you have no trouble buying the given circumstances -- that this man is the social leader of this claustrophobic provincial town. Gould is a talented actor, and he has his moments here, but he' s too heavy-spirited: from the moment he walks onstage, you think, "Oh-oh -- tragic figure!" The alcoholic poet-scholar Lovborg isn't a barrel of laughs, but an actor has to play against the way Ibsen underscores his fate. Gould falls into the trap.

The other members of the cast are more successful. Ellen O'Neall Waite makes a completely three-dimensional character out of Tesman's generous, maternal old Aunt Julia; her performance is beautifully thought out, and every moment of it is persuasive. The play opens with her in warm conversation with Berte (Claire Gregoire), the loyal servant she has parted with as a gift to her nephew and his new bride, and both actresses are so attentive and plausible that they immediately take you past the boundaries of the period and the language to the real human beings framed within them. And Kelli Deliso is a very touching Thea Elvsted. I've quarreled on other occasions with Deliso's performances at NETC, because in the past she has sometimes been mannered, but I responded completely to her warmth in last summer's Carousel, and I did again here. More than that, I thought she found something true to her own experience in this character -- something that telescopes the distance between our time and Ibsen's. The production needs more of that kind of intimacy.