Hedda Strong

Hedda Gabler

Written by Henrik Ibsen

Directed by Liza DiPrima

At the Lowell House JCR

Through this weekend

IF Fatal Attraction converted you to misogyny, going to see Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler will have you cursing the female sex ad infinitum. Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is not the kind of girl you'd want to be set on a blind date with. She's the kind of girl who plays with fire, firearms to be more precise. She's a psycho killer. Qu'est-ce que c'est?! If you dare to find out, go see her in action this weekend at the Lowell House JCR.

The crux of Hedda Gabler's discontent, as we vaguely infer from the play's early scenes, has something to do with her recent marriage to the bookish George Tesman (Erik Salovaara). Hedda is not what you would call the Stepford wife type. She gains pleasure from slamming doors, playing loud piano mazurkas, and polishing gun barrels as opposed to silver flatware. As she so matter-of-factly puts it, "I have no talent for such things as responsibilities. I have a talent for only one thing in life--boring myself to death."

Yet Hedda, played here by Holly Cate, is never a bore to watch. Cate portrays Hedda with proportionate coldness, but wisely refrains from histrionics. Hedda's fury isn't the tumultuous kind of a Lady Macbeth or a Medea. In her appropriately antiseptic delivery, Cate invokes the quiet strength of Ibsen's heroine.

On the other hand, Salovaara treats his character, George Tesman, with appropriate zeal and with particular stress on the comedic. As Salovaara doen't take his character too seriously, his performance is one of the play's funniest.

The whole mood of the play tends to center around the mercurial temperament of Hedda. This leaves the rest of the cast at her violent mercy. The pathetically weak Thea Elvstead (Susan Levine), who has become the new love interest of Hedda's old flame Eilert Lovborg (Josh Frost), becomes one of the key victims of her wrath. In a revealing scene between the two, Hedda curls Thea's mousy locks around her fingers and snarls: "Maybe I will burn off your hair."

Hedda seems to be convinced that everything she touches turns ridiculous and vile. Actually, the show suffers when Cate is out of reach. With few exceptions, the rest of the cast seems to dote on the wild fancies of the beautiful Hedda. They come to life with her fiery entrances and languish miserably in her absence.

Without Hedda on stage, these characters seem to sink into ridiculousness. The passionate pleas of Frost's lovelorn Lovborg seem almost schoolboyish. Judge Brack, played by Nestor Davidson, fares little better. As the insidiously corrupt Brack, Davidson plays up his character with a tad too much joviality. His tendency to toss lines off with Wildean abandon serves only to mar the gravity of his character.

Yet by no means is Ibsen's Hedda Gabler a mellow mood piece. It ought to leave you in a state of shock, for as the last line of the play states, "Normal people don't do such things."