Theater: A Modern Woman’s Hedda

Considering that Hedda Gabler is one of the great character portraits in all of drama, it is amazing how stiflingly unanimous critical opinion and acting theory have been about her. For decade after decade, there has been one Hedda, with only minor variations. This Hedda has been a malevolent vampire, a caged prisoner of boredom, a raging neurasthenic. Now, in an off-off-Broadway production by a group called the Opposites Company, there is a new Hedda Gabler, not only beautifully performed, but deeply and subtly thought through in terms that make it peculiarly relevant to the psychic and psychological states of the modern woman.

The basic premise from which this radically new Hedda has sprung is simply stated in the program notes by Ted van Griethuysen, who directed the play and is also the company’s artistic director: “Hedda Gabler is a good person.” The premise itself is highly debatable. Is Falstaff a good person? Are Ivanov and Amanda Wingfield good persons? As soon as a great playwright has performed an in-depth analysis and portrayal of a character, that character transcends the confining categories of good and evil. Such a character then becomes rich, opaque, fascinating, and strangely elusive of definition—in precisely the way that provocative and interesting people are in real life. Even if the premise is largely false, a plenitude of insights results from applying it.

Angles of Vision. In A Doll’s House, Ibsen showed the transition of a woman from a pampered doll to an independent being. In Hedda Gabler, he examines a woman who has totally left the doll’s house in spirit, but who still occupies it out of social convention, a woman trying to “keep house” with desperate calm while undergoing an inner earthquake. One reason that the present production seems so fresh is that Hedda’s plight is seen from Hedda’s angle of vision. The ultraneurotic Hedda has always been seen from a man’s angle of vision and caters to the male notion that a woman only has to be made love to properly to avoid becoming an angry, frustrated bitch.

Ibsen foresaw that the emancipation of women actually meant the masculinization of women. In a real but relatively limited sense, that meant acquiring a man’s education and doing a man’s job. The trickier task was to appropriate the realms of a man’s mind and will, areas that men have guarded with far more fear and hostility than they have ever displayed about their clubs, offices and colleges.

This is the threat that Hedda poses to the men in her life. She is a woman with a strong masculine component. She identifies with her late father, an army general. She not only cherishes her father’s pistols; she uses them, a symbolic and physical annexation of male prerogatives. As a very young woman, Hedda had been a kind of platonic muse to Eilert Lovborg (David Newman), a brilliant but dissolute writer and thinker. Out of temperamental fatigue (“I have danced practically all my life—and I was getting tired . . . My summer was up”), she has married an aunt-coddled pedant named Jorgen Tesman. She has moved from a danger that stirred her inner being to a safety that curdles her inner being. Lovborg has since found a new muse, Thea Elvsted (Anne Fielding), a married woman far inferior to Hedda in intellect but considerably more pliant sexually. Tesman’s friend, the somewhat sinister Judge Brack (Aldo Bonura), enters this tangled web with the motive of exploiting some of Hedda’s smoldering needs. Each helps to weave her doom.

Defiance of Fate. Rebecca Thompson, who plays Hedda, is one of the singularly lovely women of the U.S. stage. Her head and profile are sculpted with the exquisite delicacy of a Tanagra figurine. Her performance is infused with intelligence. She is the embodiment of a woman who outwardly entices and inwardly rejects. She judges and rejects the men around her not because they are men, but because they do not measure up to her ideal. Her state of mind is not one of hysteria and frustration, but of wry, detached, ironic amusement, though occasionally her inability to suffer fools gladly brings out the sharp flick of her tongue. Rebecca Thompson’s Hedda is an intellectual romantic. Part of her seeks out the austere companionship of fine minds; another part of her yearns for a man on horseback to sweep her off her high horse. Hedda can be revolted by things womanly, such as her own pregnancy, and yet crave a man “with vine leaves in his hair” who will release her from her inner reserve, from her lingering fastidiousness about what society will think.

What is insufferably painful for this Hedda is that she is totally aware of her predicament. She has aimed at the stars and settled for a cinder. Tesman, with his dusty burrowing in book after book, is not a spouse but a sedative. It is to Actor Peter Hansen’s credit that he humanizes a library mole so that the audience can accord him the pity that Hedda withholds.

For a scrupulously contained performance, Rebecca Thompson’s Hedda is remarkably affecting and finally tragic. In part, this is due to Ted van Griethuysen, whose deliberate gravity of direction achieves cumulative emotional intensity. Hedda moves inexorably toward tragedy in that her ultimate foe is not the world of mere men but what O’Neill called “the God of Things as They Are.” She regards suicide as the perfect act of courage because it is her non serviam to that god, her defiance of human fate.

When Hedda Gabler’s fatal pistol shot rang out offstage on opening night, a young woman in the second row quivered as if the bullet had entered her body, and the only sounds that those sitting near her heard thereafter, except for the last lines of the play, were her muffled sobs. On subsequent evenings, other women similarly wept. Laughter is always touted in the New York theater, but tears are too rare to go unmentioned. That is earned emotion, a spontaneous accolade to an extremely fine actress and a very great play.