Word: hedda
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...alternate weeks, the course replaces conventional classes with professional performances of excerpts from such plays as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Before each 15-to 20-minute performance, the students are briefed by an English professor on the theme of the play and by a psychiatrist on psychological traits to be observed in the characters. Afterward students, faculty and the actors themselves take part in a two-hour discussion...
...Stock-mann, the idealist who heroically fights to improve his community in An Enemy of the People, reappears in The Wild Duck as Gregers Werle, a pre-Freudian busybody who demonstrates that helping people face their problems is often just a bland way of destroying them. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Nora, the relatively innocent victim of male chauvinism in A Doll's House, is re-examined as Hedda, a modern woman whose frustrated need to assert individuality transforms her into a "suburban Lady Macbeth...
...After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene...
...approximation of a newly imported British comedy, The Philanthropist. Playwright Christopher Hampton, 24, is witty, clever, debonair; he uses the English language with sly gusto and rare affection. He has given an impressive display of that affection in his fluently idiomatic adaptations of A Doll's House and Hedda Gahler in this season's off-Broadway revivals. The misfortune in his own play is that the passion, conflict and tone of voice of a playwright saying what he feels he has to say are all but inaudible...
...rest of the cast, only Donald Madden as Eilert Lovborg, Hedda's prime target (apart from herself), achieves true Ibsenite intensity and anguish. In a profoundly moving scene he tells of losing his manuscript in the way that a carousing father might lose all track of a child and who, coming home, says to the mother, "I lost the child-completely lost him. God knows who's got hold of him." After giving an animal cry, Madden opens his mouth again in a terrible soundless scream and sags lifelessly, like a crucified soul. That is an epiphany...