Pear Theater’s Hedda Gabler Review – Ibsen on Lust, Power and Intellect

In Hedda Gabler, Hedda (Betsy Kruse Craig) gets rid of some papers
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Hedda Gabler is a dramatic triumph for Mountain View’s “off-Camino Real” Pear Theatre.

 

The plot is a triangular forerunner of the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe couple clash genre. That a tale of academic intrigue and sexual rivalry is about to play out is foreshadowed in the opening moments before George Tesman and his bride appear. Arriving in advance to greet the couple, George’s Aunt Julia corrects a misperception held by the maid she has seconded to the newlyweds along with financially guaranteeing the purchase of their furniture. Rather than the medical doctor that the maid presumes, an aspiring academic historian is another kind of doctor, a PhD.  Greta Stimson ably personifies Berte, who defines the intended upper middle-class status of the household, placing flowers on a sideboard in advance of the couple’s arrival.

Eilert Lovburg (Michael Champlin, left) and Thea Elvsted (Damaris Divito, right) are manipulated by Hedda (Betsy Kruse Craig, center)

Sitting alongside the players in an intimate theater-in the-round setting, the audience is virtually in the living room of the villa where the couple will settle after a five months honeymoon and archive tour. Eliding the years between Ibsen’s late 19th century Norwegian milieu and the present, this production’s contemporary setting, by implication, suggests the germaneness, if not universality, of the characters foibles and desires.

 

The female characters are archetypes of their sex at an early stage of liberation. Celia Maurice perceptively plays Aunt Julia to a T, exemplifying the traditional female caregiver vocation. Elizabeth Kruse Craig is superb as Hedda, precisely delineating a domineering, frustrated and malicious woman with a penchant for self-dramatization and telling put-down, e.g. noting Aunt Julia’s gaucherie in taking off her hat on the settee. Is the protagonist a proto-feminist, an unfulfilled lesbian, or simply a General’s daughter with a gender inhibited wish to emulate her father? There is evidence in the text, and in the Pear founding artistic director Diane Tasca’s liminal interpretation of the Gosse and Archer translation, to support various motivational theories. What is certain is that Hedda, a vocation-less female, whose avenue for realization is limited to advancing her husband’s status, suffers from the same vague, nameless, unease that Betty Friedan identified among her early postwar Smith College classmates in The Feminine Mystique.

(l-r) Thea (Damaris Divito) receives information from Berte (Gretta Hestenes-Stimson).

Damaris Divito touchingly portrays Thea Elvsted, a lonely rural Sheriff’s wife, whose husband is often away on business. She finds solace with her children’s tutor as a classic academic muse, a woman only allowed to express herself through a man whom she inspires to create a masterpiece, of which she is more than equal co-author. However, Thea is self-effacingly impelled to deny her agency, a classic woman in science conundrum, commonplace in 18th century botany but persisting in various guises until quite recently. It is only yesterday that a Dean told a scientist’s PhD holding wife inquiring about a position that department wives were happy to be their husband’s research associates. Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, a complementary text to this dramatization of its issues, is a partial example but one who broke through the strictures of a supporting role to Jean Paul Sartre to realize an independent identity and renown.

Eilert Lovburg (Michael Champlin) is helplessly drawn to Hedda (Betsy Kruse Craig)

The male characters also represent gender stereotypes. Troy Johnson ably plays George Tesman, a bumbling middle-class male who wishes to please his higher-class wife at any cost. Ron Talbot epitomizes Judge Brack, Hedda’s doppelganger, a devious power-hungry erstwhile friend of the family, who aspires to be the third member of a “Devil’s triangle.” Michael Champlin plays Eilert Lovberg to perfection as a transcendent figure and reformed dissolute who “reforms from his reform” and self-destructs, with a little help from Hedda. In contrast to George’s minutia on medieval Brabant economics, Eilert has written a History of the Future: a high-flying generalist contrasting with a head-down specialist. George fears him as a possible competitor for a professorial position but Eilert demurs.

Hedda Gabler

What should we make of Hedda and Thea’s passionate kiss as a bisexual underlay to a heterosexual surface? Same-sex crescendos alternate with heterosexual diminuendos, determining the outcome of this spectacle of bourgeois true life. Thea seeks support from Hedda who views her erstwhile comrade as an opponent. Thea and Eilert and then Thea and George experience the mutual flow of creative collaboration and scholarly restoration of a damaged manuscript. Intertwined relationships and secreted passions drive an inverted Communitas, a society bound by blackmail and torn by deception that spools out to produce tragedy.

 

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a meditation on the fraught condition of a modern woman who is a deeply flawed hero, unconsciously struggling, and failing, to break the bonds of patriarchy.

photo credit: Michael Craig / Pear Theatre

More information at thepear website

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