REVITALIZING ‘HEDDA GABLER’
GABRIEL REGOJO AND DANIELLE GRISKO STAR IN “HEDDA GABLER.”
Watch out for Sophia Watt. Last month, at the Landing Theatre, she directed a challenging production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna,” a play from 1992 that was supposed to be a takedown of leftist/ feminist PC culture but today feels like a #MeToo-era reclamation. And now she’s part of a team that has modernized a play written by a man more than a hundred years ago: Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” from 1891. A new adaptation is at the Rec Room through Saturday.
This is yet another challenging old script that today demands a scrupulous reexamination of representation. After all, if movies made in the 2000s don’t even hold up to today’s standards (“I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” “Wedding Crashers”), how can you expect the same from a play written 127 years ago?
Sure, “Hedda Gabler” was reviled for its protagonists’ unlikability during its time — the play’s focus on an anti-housewife housewife was radical — but today it still risks feeling out of touch.
And so producer Camron Alexander and director Watt smartly took a hatchet to many of the side plots and overlong monologues in the play, replacing the script with a 90-minute adaptation that gets to the heart using modern language. Call it the No Fear Shakespeare style of dramaturgy.
It works. Played by Danielle Grisko, Hedda here looks and talks like a Desperate Housewife. Slinking her body away from the dull domestic matters that occur in her new household, Hedda rolls her eyes and speaks in sarcastic tones. The character helps us examine the way Ibsen thought about what privileged wives were expected to be — delicate, dutiful socialites — and how a wily, ambitious, intelligent and nonconformist woman would have reacted to her situation.
Hedda cheats, lies, seduces and steals. She doesn’t care if people like her. Watt and Alexander don’t care if the audience likes her, either. This mindset is an exciting inversion of an entire history of society plays, in which women were expected to have good posture and reputation. The adaptation places Hedda in modern day New York City, the home of Carrie Bradshaw and Hannah Horvath, where she lives with her clueless husband and fends off the advances of two rival men, Judge Brack (a superbly creepy Adam Zarowski) and Eilert Lovborg (the manic, stormy Gabriel Regojo).
Ibsen’s love-quadrangle plot dealing with social climbing, mental illness, tragic genius and power dynamics remains sharply observant. The team that produced this show, the Afterglow Collective, respect the delicate structure of Ibsen’s household drama without shying away from making individual moments their own.
Hedda looks great holding a gun and pointing it at a powerful man who wants to lay claim to her. Ibsen laid the foundation for a century of kitchen-sink dramas, in which regular people, rather than Shakespeare’s kings and queens, were center stage. But “Hedda Gabler” shows that realism isn’t about gritty domestic melodrama. It’s about critiquing society in a way that would in any other situation be taboo.
In “Oleanna,” Watt had to wrestle the script away from Mamet to make sure the female character was more than a man’s thesis. Ibsen proves an easier writer to reclaim. Hedda is a woman who does terrible things. It’s cathartic to watch her burn the world around her. Because we see her smirk among the ash and cinder — and we’re compelled to do the same.