The Hunter Envoy

Issue date: 12/20/06 Section: News

One of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's later and more astringent works, Hedda Gabler stirred and polarized audiences when it was first produced in 1891. Now, drawing on the play's innate acidity, German director Thomas Ostermeier transforms Ibsen's poignant four-act drama into a streamlined and grimly ironic portrait of modern social dissolution, in a gleefully menacing adaptation, which enjoyed a brief run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Lichtenstein Theater from November 28-December 2.

Plays change. Over the years, they evolve or pass into obscurity; with time, their relevance accrues or fades. As our social structures shift, our classics resonate in different ways and say different things, provoking more insightful theater artists to find new ways to revivify them through inventive productions. In 2004, Nora, Ostermeier's revisionist adaptation of Ibsen's proto-feminist classic, A Doll's House, scandalized New York audiences when, instead of merely walking out on her short-sighted husband, Nora brandished a gun and discharged a couple rounds into his well-meaning chest. Although his more recent modernization of Hedda Gabler is somewhat less radical, its sneering statement about contemporary culture is no less timely. Of course, purists will bemoan the abridged narrative and references to laptops, cell phones and AIDS. Nevertheless, Ostermeier, who is co-artistic director of the Schaubühne Theater in Berlin, has managed to distill the brutal essence of-and caustic humor in-Ibsen's social critique.

"The play tells us about a situation in which everyone feels they have settled in some kind of "establishment," with sufficient financial security and no immediate existential threat," said Ostermeier, in a Q&A session with Joseph V. Melillo, BAM's executive director. "Then, suddenly, they become aware of a horrible vacuum of meaning; what were once revolutionary thoughts and utopian ideas have become compromises and pragmatism. I think that this painful longing for another life-the 'Hedda-feeling'-is symptomatic of our time and our culture."

Employing Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel's modernized translation, Ostermeier sets Hedda's machinations against the backdrop of contemporary German academia, a setting in which isolation and ennui, not social inequities, set off her existential malaise. With Schmidt-Henkel, Ostermeier successfully updates Ibsen's script to accommodate a contemporary context, the cleverer modifications-Aunt Julle's hat exchanged for a tacky visor, a brothel for a strip club-eliciting knowing laughter from those who are conversant with the play. However, his innovations extend past superficial chronological accuracy. Whereas Ibsen's Hedda struggles against the patriarchal ideologies that pervaded turn-of-the-century Norwegian culture, Ostermeier's Hedda (Katharina Schüttle), living in a modern world in which those social constraints have considerably, if not entirely, slackened, appears to conspire and manipulate for sheer spite.

The acting is uniformly brilliant, albeit with surprising modifications. Lars Eidinger rightly invests Hedda's husband, the na've Jürgen Tesman, with the slightest edge of potential violence, the occasional fulfillments of which are a pulse-quickening contrast to his otherwise exasperating wishy-washiness. Likewise, the scheming sexual entreaties of Brack (Jörg Hartmann) are played starkly on the surface, whereas Ibsen tucked them under a thick layer of subtext. Finally, the would-be genius Eilert Lövborg (Kay Bartholomäus Schulze) isn't the fated romantic figure of so many productions, but rather a wispy, and easily hysterical, doomster. In the realm of dramatic literature, the sheer extremity and seeming motivelesseness of Hedda's havoc-wreaking is matched perhaps only by Shakespeare's Iago, making her one of the most complex, controversial and richly rewarding roles in dramatic history. Schüttle is a pouty and exceedingly callous Hedda, a spoiled, disillusioned child in an age of material comfort and self-obsession. The coldly seductive twenty-six-year-old actress-who honed her chops playing extreme roles, like Cate in Sarah Kane's post-apocalyptic tour de force Blasted (also directed by Ostermeier)-sets a grim tone from which the rest of the production takes its cue.

"I knew from the beginning that I wanted an actress that would make me believe that Hedda's being bored of her life is an existential state of mind, not simply a result of her age," said Ostermeier.

Undoubtedly the show's most striking element, Jon Pappelbaum's appropriately austere stage design is a marvel of theatrical economy. The revolving set, replete with an overhead mirror and a giant panel of sliding glass doors, evokes a sense of the interminable exposure in which Hedda lives. Finally, a production of Hedda Gabler is only as good as the potency of its famous dénouement, and, on this score, Ostermeier delivers in spades. No one lifts a finger when the fatal gunshot sounds. As the wistful harmonies of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" fill the auditorium, the stage revolves to reveal Hedda's body slumped against the bedroom wall. "Naughty" Hedda has been playing with her father's pistols again, but no one seems to care. It's a mordant note on which to close, even for a production with ice in its veins.

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