Word: hedda
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CHOOSING TO PRESENT a play as good as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler--as the Quincy House Drama Society must have realized--considerably lightens the director's workload. Still, it doesn't make it disappear. The lackluster production in the Quincy House JCR this weekend shows the effects of this gap in reasoning. Uninspired line-reading and pacing, added to a lack of attention to both the grand shape of the plot and the details of the illusion, can't entirely quench the snap and sparkle of Ibsen's dialogue or the power of the story he tells, but they...
...first, director Roger Kaplan seems to be aiming for minimalism, a severe understatement that admirably suits the grim plot. The characters wear black and wander around their comfortable living room (Quincy's unadorned common room) with the same aimless ferocity that characterizes their power games. Hedda (Julie Cohen), newly married to the buffoonish George Tesman (Curt Raffi), is bitter and trapped, seeking to find artistic fulfillment by manipulating the men around her. In the few days that follow her return with Tesman from their honeymoon, Hedda gradually becomes twisted in her own plots, trapped by the circumstances that once made...
...hard to concentrate when few of the characters seem plugged into what's going on, either on the superficial level of scenery and props or the more essential one of tension and buildup. Cohen as Hedda has a good sense of time and tone, and her sudden still pauses are effective at first, but through too much of the play she seems merely to be walking from pose to pose; the intensity that could lead Hedda to destroy men's careers in her quest for "perfect moments" appears only in intermittent flashes. Raffi as Tesman and Linda Gray...
Britain's David Hare, 35, offers all of that, and something more. At the heart of Plenty is a strange, beautiful, demonically incandescent woman. A twin to Hedda...
...trace of that early reticence remains nonetheless. Part of her reserve is a learned, animal response to prying reporters. "I have a great respect for my privacy," she says, "and the only way I can keep myself private is by not being too open. I once opened up to Hedda Hopper, and she stuck a knife in my ribs. That taught...