Hedda Gabler

by Henrik Ibsen, Directed by Hal Cropp
Commonweal Theatre
April 14

Any production of Hedda Gabler revolves around the character of Hedda Gabler, who is actually Hedda Tesman after her recent marriage. I’m reminded of a comment by Jonathan Gillard Daly about his role as Richard in The Great River Shakespeare Festival’s production of Richard III. Daly realized that for the play to work, his character had to dominate every scene he was in; there could be no coasting, no letting other actors carry the energy. This is what we expect from our great hero/villains like Richard, Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth; it is part of what fascinates us about them. The Commonweal’s Adrienne Sweeny begins the play with this sort of dominance—she bursts onto the stage confident, agitated, and malicious. She insults her new Aunt, her new maid, and her new home with a calculated but seemingly unnecessary spitefulness. But ultimately, the circumstances of the play will prevent Hedda and Sweeney the opportunity of being the great villain; during the course of the play, Hedda is slowly crowded off of her own stage.

With Ibsen’s modernist approach to tragedy, Hedda’s fall from nobility began long before the play begins. At 29, her beauty and social stature are slipping away. That she has married below herself socially is reaffirmed again and again by the other character’s astonishment that she has married George Tesman. The refrain, even from Tesman himself, runs to variations of, “imagine, Hedda Gabler.” Hedda is the daughter of the great General Gabler, whose portrait hangs above the stage (and is lit between scenes, a bit too brightly, as a reminder of her former status). It’s also clear that the marriage is a step down financially. While George has prospects for an appointment at the University, Aunt Julie and Judge Parker both remark on the expense of maintaining a wife like Hedda Gabler. One can assume that her seemingly loveless marriage to George (who adores Hedda, in his detached, clueless manner) was a result of diminishing options for Hedda. Hedda’s fall is not simply a social one; she is losing control over her own life as indicated by the loss of control over her immediate surroundings.

In the Commonweal production, the Tesman drawing room is littered with crates containing Tesman’s research materials. As the play proceeds, more crates are placed on stage, literally and symbolically leaving little room for Hedda. Along with the physical space, the characters who inhabit the space further deflate Hedda by simply ignoring her meanness. Tesman’s Aunt Julie, played by Nancy Carruthers Huisenga, responds to Hedda’s slights with syrupy sweetness. Huisenga displays a slight bit of hurt after Hedda insults her prize hat, a hat she purchased especially to please Hedda, but very quickly moves beyond the insult. Later when Tesman assures Hedda that Aunt Julie has forgotten the incident, it isn’t simply a comforting gesture. Huisenga’s Aunt Julie really seems to have forgotten it, and in forgetting the insult, Hedda becomes even more invisible.

While Hedda has landed in a house that was purchased and furnished to her desires, the space is clearly not hers. Aunt Julie doesn’t live there, but her close relationship with Tesman, played by Scott Dixon, maintains her presence in the house. She is annoyingly selfless: along with giving her personal house keeper to the newlyweds, she has put up her pension to help Tesman secure this new house, she takes care of her invalid sister, and after her sister dies, she looks for another invalid to take care of. Dixon’s childish affection for his aunt (he calls her “Aunty Ju Ju” in this production) is completely genuine, and this relationship adds to the harmony in the house, a harmony that Hedda desperately attempts to disrupt. Dixon plays Tesman as a husband devoted to his new wife, without any expectations of her. He doesn’t expect her to love him, to care about his career, or to take interest in his dying Aunt Rina. He is delighted to be married to Hedda, but beyond that, he is too happy with his own world to take much notice of her. There is no place for a heroic villain in this sea of contented, selfless, bland love.

Dixon, in his brilliant portrayal of the hapless academic Tesman, has a way of ending sentences with an irritating drawn out “hmm” to punctuate his vapid convictions. He wants nothing other than the kind of love he has with his aunt, and his only hint of disapproval of Hedda comes when he asks if she couldn’t try and call his aunt “Aunty Ju Ju” instead of “Miss Tesman,” or when he asks her to visit the deathbed of Aunty Rina. He accepts refusals on both accounts without much sign of disappointment. Later, Tesman is overjoyed when Hedda (mistakenly) reveals a small amount of concern for his position at the university and actually calls him George for the first time. Hedda mockingly responds to Tesman’s euphoria by suggesting that he run and tell Aunty Ju Ju the good news. Tesman misses the insult and assures her that he will do just that. Dixon/Tesman’s inability to be wounded by Hedda makes her malice harmless, and in a sense, it further helps her disappear.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to paint Ibsen’s tragedy in terms of late 20th Century notions of identity politics, as I am certainly doing. And it would be going too far to say that Hedda is simply a victim of her environment and the confining role of women in late 19th Century society. But I think the Commonweal is right to highlight a desperation in Hedda, to underscore that this woman of power and substance has been squeezed into an insipid life with dwindling prospects of being an actor in her own life’s drama. And yet, Sweeney’s Hedda is much more complex than a hapless victim of diminishing options and oppressive circumstances. For all of her outward bravado, at pivotal moments in her life, she has stopped short of the kind of bold action that her forceful persona suggests she would take without hesitation.

Her forceful action during the play is limited to appropriations of the undertakings of the two visitors who operate on a different credo than the insipid one that pervades the Tesman home. The first of those characters is the unhappily married Thea, a timid woman who had been tormented by Hedda when they were school girls. Yet Thea, unlike Hedda, is able to take action despite her outward persona and lower social position. Thea certainly experiences the same societal limitations confronting Hedda, but Thea is able to take steps that Hedda herself would not likely ever risk. The other character is Eilert Lovborg whose last contact with Hedda involved looking at the wrong end of a dueling pistol. While Lovborg seems an unlikely hero for Hedda to attach her hopes to, she does exactly that, pinning her ultimate salvation on his ability to rise above and beyond his personal demons.

The character of Hedda Gabler is missing a couple other characteristics that might allow an audience to identify with a hero/villain. Richard in Richard III, for example, begins the play telling the audience exactly what he is going to do and why. The audience becomes both observer and conspirator in the progression of actions that Richard takes to achieve his goals. But with Hedda, the audience isn’t a conspirator; it doesn’t even understand what Hedda wants. She articulates her motivation in terms of an idealized heroic beauty. Unlike Richard’s clear and tangible goals, Hedda’s is ephemeral and skewed by her father’s understanding of military valor, her inflated sense of entitlement, and her current state of desperation and powerlessness. In short, the audience can’t see where her villainy might lead. The result is a character who is complex, realistic, and far to much like us for us to be comfortable with.

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Before I saw the premiere of Hedda Gabler, I had the pleasure of listening to Ibsen Scholar Joan Templeton’s talk “Hedda Gabler, Hedda Gabler: Who Is She?” as part of the Commonweal’s 12th annual Ibsen Festival. Early in her presentation, Templeton offered a sampling from a long line of criticism on the character of Hedda, dating back to the premier performance in 1890. While a handful of reviewers saw in Hedda a strong woman, a complex human being, or a hero championing women’s rights, many reviewers saw Hedda as simply too evil to be allowed on the stage. While audiences are mesmerized by the calculated evil of other heroic villains, they have often felt revulsion for the character of Hedda. We laughed along with Templeton as she read the quotes from reviewers who obviously “didn’t get it,” who missed the oppression that Hedda faced and who clearly had outdated modes of a woman’s role in the home and in society. I think we were laughing with the secure knowledge that from our own enlightened vantage point in 2009, we would be able to see Hedda as the strong and complex character that Ibsen intended. However, after seeing the production, the nagging (and slightly embarrassing) question in my head seemed to match some of the less than enlightened reviewers: “Why does Hedda have to be so mean, especially to Aunty Ju Ju?”

Hedda Gabler plays through June 12
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre