"HEDDA GABBLER"

In two weeks space Cambridge has twice has an opportunity to see to what lengths beings the wife of a professor will drive a leading lady. In "Uncle Vanya," which the Studio Players recently put on, and in "Hedda Gabbler", which Blanche Yurka opened Monday night, the lady becomes so bored with her existence that she makes a plot for Chekov or for Ibsen. Perhaps because, in the pattern of an older generation, there were no clubs or sports to keep women busy, or because they congenitally lacked any insight or interest in research before the days of women's colleges, their only outlet lay in society or love. Even today, it is possible that a Brattle Street spouse, unthrilled over the development of domestic industry in Brabant in the Middle Ages, might find either alternative essential.

The Russian, Helena Andreievna, true to her national character, merely exists; a scornful abnegation of action, pathetic and complete, amid a provincial atmosphere of absolute futility and endless talk. Nobody dies, nobody lives; the play is another month in the country, and ends as it began. The Western Hedda winds a different tale around herself; frustration drives her to the point of active fiendishness.

The difference is intensified by the acting of Miss Yurka. One is loth to blame her for her declamatory style of acting in a play that was written when such acting was in vogue, but at times one thinks the lady does protest too much, to render ludicrous a scene which Eva Le Gallienne's more subdued portrayal would have made dramatic. Her manner also makes her seem too feline and too charmless to attract the trio of men that the author gathers round her. She is a witch, and not a leading lady.

The supporting cast, however, does a highly creditable job. Russell Hicks, and Judge Brack, is a very grand and pleasing man of the world, whose pursuit of fair women he makes seem a splendid avocation. The professor, Dallas Anderson, and his aunt, Miss Doris Rich do first rate acting to make their ingenuousness more real than the villainy of the Judge or "Bedda Gabbler."

As for the play, it is a masterpiece of construction and of dialogue. When this reveiwer read the play he thought that Ibsen in it may have had a message which he was unable to express, but on the stage the play seems to prove very little as a thesis, except that people do do things like that. Yet, the story is so superbly told that its telling is an end in itself, quite justifiable, compared at least with Shaw's new play, which carries a poor message, and no melodrama. The threads of repartee between three contrasting pairs of characters are deftly managed for contrast and effect; they presage tragedy ominously well; and in the end the author ties them together with a bang.