"Hedda Gabler" is the most puzzling of Henrik Ibsen's successful, realistic dramas, a tragedy with perplexing behavior and a confounding title character.
Hedda has been called frigid, neurotic, spiteful, manipulative and vengeful. In more current language, she's one twisted sister, a beguiling, middle-class housewife with upper-class willfulness and depth of soul. With every reason to conform, she schemes instead to destroy everyone around her, succeeding, to some extent, before destroying herself.
Though created at the end of the last century, she endures as the most compelling anti-heroine of our own time. That scope sometimes obscures the brilliant structure and layered symbols in Ibsen's text. Though accessibly real, the story hides a web of interlocking triangular relationships, a complex system of comings and goings and indirect commentary on alcoholism, prostitution, Victorian mores and the oppression of women. One unborn child and one symbolic one (a manuscript) are both aborted-almost incidentally-as part of the operatic documentary.
An inspired recent film version managed by portraying Hedda, from start to finish, as raving mad. It says something of the versatility of the script that Russell Vandenbroucke's revival for Northlight Theatre also succeeds, though more humbly, as a bubbly comedy of manners with a melodramatic kick.
As Hedda, Michelle Elise Duffy is much younger than most of her middle-age predecessors in the role. That proves risky but fascinating. Her youthful, sexy firebrand, old before her time, is more understandable in her caprice. She's also wound tight as a time bomb, restlessly entombed in her husband's home as if in a sepulcher, one cagily decked out in bleached white curtains and drab blond furniture by designer Linda Buchanan.
Though Duffy's air of carefully crafted hauteur wears thin, her flashes of anger are those of youthful passion, and in a brilliant scene with David New, as her ersatz lover Eilert Lovborg, she drops the mask for incendiary stage colloquy. Their scene together-following much of the icy drawing room comedy that precedes it-is fleshy, mesmerizing libido unveiled, the blood underneath Ibsen's complicated social discourse suddenly bubbling to the surface.
Vandenbroucke uses these players and the rest to tell a crisp, compelling story that slows down only a bit near its end, that only rarely overplays-as when Hedda wails when burning Lovborg's manuscript. New is less the Byronic figure of tradition than a quirky, disturbed modern dipsomaniac, itching to abandon sobriety for secret demons. As Hedda's sexless husband, Jeffrey Hutchinson puts Duffy and New in subtle relief, his gentle, realistic characterization serving up both comedy and pathos. Bruce A. Young plays Hedda's lordly protector, tyrant and dupe, Judge Brack, with unctuous glee.
David Chambers' and Anne-Charlotte Harvey's translation, for an earlier mounting at South Coast Repertory, glimmers with helpful contemporary language, down to the Judge's final, reverberating line of ironic denial: People just don't do such things.
"Hedda Gabler" plays through March 26 at Northwestern University's Barber Theatre, 1979 N. Campus Drive, Evanston. Phone 708-869-7278.