Hedda Gabler is a play largely trapped inside its protagonist’s head. It’s a sense preserved by Studio Theatre’s production. Staged with Scandinavian simplicity, the production allows the characters and their emotions to come to the fore. The stage shows only the Hedda’s tastefully decorated living room, with two doors to hint at the world outside. Within these walls Hedda herself reigns supreme. Wheedling, peevish, petulant, golden, and at times cloyingly sweet, her machinations drive both the play’s sense of motion and its feeling of suffocation.
When it first premiered in 1891, one review described it as “a bad escape of moral sewage gas,” saying that, “Hedda’s soul is a-crawl with the foulest passions of humanity.”
And to be honest, that’s true.
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler tells the story of a selfish, petulant, beautiful woman. While less well-known than A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen’s greatest works. This suffocating, inwardly focused drama, focuses on a few days in the life of Hedda herself, showing the full horror of Sartre’s quip that “hell is other people.”
The plot follows Jorge and Hedda (nee Gabler) Tesman, a newly married couple just returning home from their honeymoon. While Jorge is content to settle down to a new academic career and domestic bliss, Hedda sees the walls of their new home as a chic, comfortable prison. She is inescapably, insufferably bored and nearly repulsed by the presence of those around her. The arrival of Eijert Lovborg (Shane Kenyon), a former flame and recovered drunk who now seems to be on the cusp of academic greatness, gives Hedda a glimpse of what might have been.
Trapped by her own fear of scandal, Hedda feels she can neither survive domesticity nor rebel against it. Instead, she merely strives to tear down the happiness of those around her, specifically Lovborg and his mistress, muse, and research assistant, Thea Elvsted (Kimiye Corwin).
Julia Coffey, in her Studio Theatre debut, is masterful as Hedda, capturing both her stubborn willfulness and the undercurrent of despair. You wouldn’t want her as a friend, but, for all of this, she’s a captivating figure. Like a child, Hedda does not know what she wants, only that she doesn’t yet have it. Wishing to see only the fine and beautiful parts of life, not sickness, death, or ugliness, she both wishes to escape and lacks the strength to break with convention.
Her performance is paired with a strong performance by Kenyon, who gives the role of Lovborg a curiously modern twist. When Lovborg describes his work, a philosophical treatise on the nature of the future, Kenyon manages to capture the cadence and tone of the sort of idealist one finds in the corner of a coffee shop, spinning images of a world the way it might be. He’s so earnest you want to believe—after all, he might be right.
The mark of great literature is its ability to speak beyond its own time and place. While this new translation by Mark O’Rowe updates the language slightly, the personalities and their struggle remain suspended, outside of time. Instead, the actions and symbols of the play become the sort of stark afterimages you see even after the curtain goes down: Hedda in a red dress playing with her pistols, a room filled to suffocation with white flowers, a man broken by the loss of a work so precious he deemed it his child.
