Hedda+Gobler+Critique+-+Adelman


 * Good job Jonathan. You zeroed in on particulars while giving the performers the benefit of the doubt as to how their roles fit into the production choices that must have been informed by both the actors and the director.**


 * A**

Jonathan Adelman Tuesday, October 21, 2014 Theater 2001 Hedda Gabler Critique

For a simple plot, //Hedda Gabler// was a very confusing play, perhaps an analogy to the main character. Hedda Gabler is a bored housewife with nothing to do, and thus has to find ways to pass the time. Throughout the play the audience tries to discern who Hedda really is and what she wants, a task that proves to be quite demanding and tiresome. This made the play difficult to understand and was only made even more complicated by the final scene. The play moves slowly and takes place in one room in Hedda and Jurgen’s new house. However opposite to Clybourne Park, instead of an actual room the set is very abstract with a black background, hanging mirrors, and manikins.

For the most part, the actors, costume designer, and director did a very good job embodying the characters from the start. The play starts out with Jurgen Tesman (but for the remained of this paper we will call him “Tesman” as his wife does) speaking with his aunt about his travels and his wife Hedda. During this scene Tesman is running around the room putting all his books in order, and unloading book after book from his luggage. There are piles of books everywhere and Tesman talks to his aunt as he frantically organizes his books. The placement of all of these piles of books serves to immediately inform the audience that he is indeed an academic. Tesman talks like a nerd as well: the way he annunciates things, the words he uses, and the occasional stumbling over his words (however I was not sure if this was intentional or merely blunders by the actor, but it did add to the character). He is wearing dark framed glasses and exactly what one would envision their literature teacher to be wearing. Then Hedda walks in, and the differences between the two characters are stark. Throughout most of the play, Hedda walks gracefully and is wearing a fashionable outfit. She contrasts Tesman’s inelegance not only through fashion but also speech. Hedda talks quite eloquent and not in the almost comical way that Tesman talks. Hedda cements her cultural dominance over the Tesmans when she assumes that the aunt’s hat is in fact the maid’s. Similar to Hedda, Judge’s language and outfit exude a sense of high-society. Judge is always dressed nicely in a coat and tie and he too, like Hedda, speaks in a very grandiose manner. Hedda and Judge are definitely from the same “circle” and thus have much more in common than Hedda does with her husband or anyone else in the play. The last character that I will mention is that of Ejlert Lövborg. While Eljert is a nerd, he is clearly much more unwieldy than Tesman. He is dressed in a very disheveled looking outfit and talks of grand ideas. Besides the actress that portrayed Hedda, this actor does the best job of portraying the nuances of his character. Unlike Tesman, Eljert is a very complex character and not a one-dimensional stereotype of an astute professor who loves his aunt way too much. Nevertheless, for all of these characters their costumes, language, and the way in which they enter immediately convey to the audience who they are and what their background is, though not necessarily what their intentions are. However one aspect that presented a curveball in the play was that the characters were all living in the modern era.

The director clearly opted to portray this nineteenth century play in modern times. This decision is obvious not only through the costumes but also by the technology used during the play; at one point Tesman uses his IPhone and later in the play Eljert pulls out his manuscript on a tablet. One dilemma that arouse from this decision was that the script did not match the time period being portrayed or the props that were being used. For example when Hedda confides that she has indeed destroyed the manuscript she says that she burned all the pages, when in fact the audience saw her take a hammer to the tablet. For the duration of the play the broken tablet sits in the middle of the set, invisible to the other characters. These kinds of inconsistencies jolted me from of the make-believe world of the play like a splash of ice water. However, this is just one of the “creative” shifts that were made taking a direction away from the realism of the original play.

This particular production of Hedda Gobbler took a realist play written by one of the most famous realist play writers, Henrik Ibsen, and produced it in a very unrealistic fashion. Firstly, the set is very abstract and surrealistic. The background is a black unfinished wall with different colored curtains getting smaller from floor to ceiling and hanging mirrors of different sizes and colors. There are also manikins, folding chairs, and luggage spread out around the room. The production gets even more unusual with the staging of “off stage” actors. Actors who are not in the current scene sit around the backside of the stage watching the performance. There are even times when the “off-stage” actors interact with those directly participating in the scene. The most unnatural of these encounters is when Tesman kisses his aunt’s hand, which comes out of nowhere and completely detracts from the scene. There are also some very disturbing moments in the play when actors stand up and laugh from behind the curtains that are in front of their seats. In some instances, the actors talking from behind the curtains were serving a realistic function, as they were supposed to be the characters talking in the other room. However, there were many instances of unsettling laughter while the actors pushed against the curtains making outlines of their bodies. The main action at the end of the play, Hedda killing herself, even takes places in of these cocoon-like structures. Originally these unrealistic aspects were troubled me; however, if we try to relate these creative decisions to the text of the play, some striking overlaps appear.

These unrealistic elements may have actually been used to further develop Hedda’s character for the audience. The room itself is quite empty in the middle with the outside world all kept at bay by these curtains. The lighting also appears to highlight the area within the curtains making everything beyond dark. This may serve to act as a parallel to Hedda’s isolation. She is trapped at home, where the outside world can interact with her (and laugh at her) but she cannot act against it. All of Hedda’s attempts to secure power have failed – Judge blackmails her, her devout husband ignores her to write a book, and Eljert, the man she had wrapped around her little finger, kills himself in a bloody mess in the arms of another woman. Hedda is alone, powerless, left to her own devices to entertain herself. She tries to find pleasure in manipulating others but this sort of joy is short-lived and fails at the end of the play. It is not until the end that we see Hedda behind one of the central curtains, away from the void of the center of the stage, as she prepares to take her own life. Thus the abstract set and the bizarre staging may have been created to further the perception of Hedda’s powerlessness and isolation.

It was not until after the play that I was able to make sense of both the plot and the abstract nature in which the performance was produced. Though the director’s creative choices make sense after deep reflection, I believe that during the play these abstract elements primarily served to confuse the audience on multiple occasions. While the intentions were sound, I believe that these ideas were poorly implemented and thus detracted from the play.