Getting a Hedda
By David Finkle
Hedda Gabler
By Henrik Ibsen
New York Theater Workshop
79 E. 4th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
In Ivo van Hove's extremely--and surprisingly--well-received
treatment of Hedda Gabler, when George Tesman says to
his Aunt Julia, "Why don't we sit down on the sofa and have a
little chat," she joins him on the sofa. When Hedda talks about
her father's pistols and goes to retrieve one, she plucks an actual
pistol from a glass case on an upstage wall. In most productions,
these would be unremarkable occurrences. In Van Hove's, they're
startling.
The Flemish director, whose fourth New
York Theater Workshop production this is, normally avoids such
literal actions. In the past, he has scorned any sheep-like following
of conventional authors' explicit or implicit requirements. For
instance, no one in his 1999 Streetcar Named Desire lighted
a cigarette when the stage directions called for it. In his 1997
attack on Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, he
decided that if characters behaved childishly, he'd show them
splay-legged on the floor and braying like infants. (Although
O'Neill wrote Stark Young that he'd finished More Stately
Mansions, it was reported more than once elsewhere that he
considered it unfinished. Van Hove finished it off, all right.)
So sitting through Van Hove's previous
offerings, a patron may well have had the feeling that this director
would rather hawk hot dogs at Yankee Stadium than pay strict attention
to mundane details. Van Hove invariably has something hotly and
doggedly iconoclastic in mind. He wants to shake up whatever is
routine. Reviewing his Streetcar, in which Blanche's
lounging around in a tub became a fixation, Jonathan Kalb wrote
that the director "is the enemy of subtext." He meant, of course,
that Van Hove has no fealty to the hidden aspect of what characters
are thinking and feeling beneath the lines they're uttering. For
Van Hove, the proper way to direct a play is to gut the text for
the subtext, make the subtext into the text. If, while smoking
a cigarette, one character is considering attacking another, Van
Hove might say, "Forget about the damn ciggie-butt and stage the
attack."
There's another way of looking at Van Hove's
approach that suggests itself in the month Jacques Derrida dies.
Although it has become a cliché--and frequently a misreading--to
trace much of contemporary adventurous art to Derrida's notion
of deconstruction, it makes sense to suggest that the crusading
philosopher's belief in layers of meaning is echoed in Van Hove's
exploration into the layers beneath a play's surface. Derrida
wrote about breakdown of meaning, and Van Hove is dealing with
breakdown of characters for whom existence is slowly drained of
meaning. These may be decidedly Eurocentric preoccupations but
they have clearly made it across the Atlantic for good.
For all these reasons, Van Hove's art has
annoyed many stateside patrons while delighting others. I have
to admit I've been with the former mob. I also have to report
that the man's approach to Henrik Ibsen's revered study of a bored
housewife white-knuckling her way into madness nevertheless works
like a charm for me.
Yes, Van Hove still plays the unconventional
card, and so does Jan Versweyveld, his regular scenic designer.
In depicting the Tesman home, Versweyveld has turned the New York
Theater Workshop stage and auditorium into an under-construction
contemporary loft. Sheetrock adorned with rhythmic rows of white
spackle serves as the walls. It glares at the audience from the
moment the doors open. These unfinished walls, broken only by
three metal doors and a pair of glass doors facing a walled terrace,
imply from the outset Van Hove's point about subtext. He and Versweyveld
are signaling that what's usually hidden will be exposed here.
(Incidentally, Versweyveld also seems to
have another European mold-breaker in mind: Rem Koolhaas. The
set for Hedda strongly echoes Koolhaas's design for Prada's
flagship store in Manhattan's Soho. Perhaps what we have here
is a Prada-influenced theater set as architectural installation.
Fashionistas everywhere are claiming nowadays that other couturiers
are cribbing from Miuccia Prada. We may soon have the same complaint
picked up by theater cognoscenti.)
The breathtaking look of this Hedda
Gabler, however, is only the beginning of why it redeems
Van Hove's former transgressions for me. In writing his plays,
Ibsen jolted the theater out of prevailing doldrums. To find a
modern equivalent for that sort of cobweb-sweeping, a director
has to uncover a viable correlative. By stripping away niceties,
Van Hove does just that. Hedda Gabler is about repressed
rage. So Van Hove, giving the play a modern setting, perceptively
nods at current attitudes towards venting fury. Tempering rage
is currently discouraged. And Van Hove won't let Ibsen's volatile
figures do it. Throughout the production, Hedda (Elizabeth Marvel),
boyish hubby George (Jason Butler Harner), former lover Eilert
Lovborg (Glenn Fitzgerald), cocky Judge Brack (John Douglas Thompson),
and pathetic Mrs. Elvsted (Ana Reeder) break into drywall-shaking
outbursts. These unpredictable furies are like post-traumatic
stress sufferers for whom anger management has failed. Their behavior
as they speak Ibsen's famous lines makes complete sense in 2004.
(Once more incidentally, Van Hove uses
Christopher Hampton's translation, first heard in 1972, when Hillard
Elkins produced Hedda Gabler with A Doll's House
for his then-wife Claire Bloom. Wearing period costumes, Bloom--who
often looks as if she is banking sizable internal fires--was magnificently
out of sorts. A few small changes have been made: the hat Aunt
Julia wears, for instance, which Hedda cruelly criticizes during
the early morning visit, is now a sweater. This is no doubt in
recognition of the fact that a lady no longer needs to wear a
hat.)
Van Hove's success with Hedda
issues from an array of ingenious touches. Hedda's piano playing--which
she does to kill time right up to the moment before she kills
herself--becomes an emblem of tedium. The miserable newlywed is
picking out a dreary melody before the action begins for real.
(John Cage fans may not think this is trying, because it's one
of his works, but the intent is to register terminal boredom.)
When she moves away from the instrument to sit on the floor and
remains there for long minutes, the melody continues. (The sound
design is also Versweyveld's.) Because Hedda refers to flowers,
Van Hove distributes bouquets of them in metal containers. When
Hedda is upset, she strews the blooms around and even staples
a half dozen to the walls. When Judge Brack assaults Hedda with,
of all things, a can of V-8 juice, she is simultaneously docile
and turned on. The sequence is both disgusting and riveting.
By the way, Hedda Gabler, as Ibsen wrote
the overwrought woman, makes one of dramatic literature's most
striking late entrances. No late entrance here, however, as she
is introduced with that pre-show plunking. Ibsen means Hedda's
influence on the temperament of the household to hover thickly
in the hermetically sealed air, and Van Hove makes certain the
point isn't missed by keeping the lady ever-present, immobile
and gloomy (sometimes watching an upstage televison), even when
Ibsen means for her to huff off.
As Hedda, Elizabeth Marvel lives up to
her surname. She was a good sport as waterlogged Blanche five
years ago, but here she shines. From slow boil to full flame,
she's imperially commanding, conveying the full depth of Hedda's
disdain for her ineffectual husband and for Mrs. Elvsted. With
a whip-lash tongue and sidelong glances with the texture of icicles,
she signals her longing for, and resentment of, Lovborg . The
other players also keep up Van Hove's punishing pace. Jason Butler
Harner as George Tesman and Glenn Fitzgerald as Eilert Lovborg
go full steam with Van Hove's view of them as boy-men. They indulge
in energetic horseplay, and Fitzgerald gives himself over to one
of those throw-a-tantrum-on-the-floor routines Van Hove likes
as illustrations of childish behavior. (Remember, one of Hedda's
unspoken gripes is that she's saddled to an immature hubby.)
As Aunt Julia, Mary Beth Peil is chic and
more openly drawn to George than the typical Aunt Julia is. There's
a moment when she practically lies across him on that white sofa.
As Judge Brack, John Douglas Thompson is also more demonstrative
sexually than is customary, and this is the case with Ana Reeder
as Mrs. Elvsted as well. Elzbieta Cryzewska as Berte the maid--who,
like Hedda, practically never disappears from sight, spending
her down-time dully in a side chair--is yet another barely contained
personage.
There is one drawback to this Hedda
Gabler. It's the problem that almost always arises when a
director sets out to shake the cobwebs from a classic. Avidly
eschewing the expected, he places the central focus on the process
of reinvention. But when any production begins to be about theater
procedure, it detracts full attention from what is happening to
the characters--both in and between the lines. A text that means
to have a visceral effect is transformed into something aimed
at cerebral assessment, at admiration for something external to
the script. One thinks less about what's happening than about
how the director is allowing it to happen. Van Hove has indeed
shamelessly called attention to himself with his Hedda Gabler,
but he has nevertheless refreshed Ibsen so forcibly that attention
must be paid.
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