Word: hedda
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Considering that Hedda Gabler is one of the great character portraits in all of drama, it is amazing how stiflingly unanimous critical opinion and acting theory have been about her. For decade after decade, there has been one Hedda, with only minor variations. This Hedda has been a malevolent vampire, a caged prisoner of boredom, a raging neurasthenic. Now, in an off-off-Broadway production by a group called the Opposites Company, there is a new Hedda Gabler, not only beautifully performed, but deeply and subtly thought through in terms that make it peculiarly relevant to the psychic and psychological...
...basic premise from which this radically new Hedda has sprung is simply stated in the program notes by Ted van Griethuysen, who directed the play and is also the company's artistic director: "Hedda Gabler is a good person." The premise itself is highly debatable. Is Falstaff a good person? Are Ivanov and Amanda Wingfield good persons? As soon as a great playwright has performed an in-depth analysis and portrayal of a character, that character transcends the confining categories of good and evil. Such a character then becomes rich, opaque, fascinating, and strangely elusive of definition-in precisely...
Angles of Vision. In A Doll's House, Ibsen showed the transition of a woman from a pampered doll to an independent being. In Hedda Gabler, he examines a woman who has totally left the doll's house in spirit, but who still occupies it out of social convention, a woman trying to "keep house" with desperate calm while undergoing an inner earthquake. One reason that the present production seems so fresh is that Hedda's plight is seen from Hedda's angle of vision. The ultraneurotic Hedda has always been seen from...
This is the threat that Hedda poses to the men in her life. She is a woman with a strong masculine component. She identifies with her late father, an army general. She not only cherishes her father's pistols; she uses them, a symbolic and physical annexation of male prerogatives. As a very young woman, Hedda had been a kind of platonic muse to Eilert Lovborg (David Newman), a brilliant but dissolute writer and thinker. Out of temperamental fatigue ("I have danced practically all my life-and I was getting tired . . . My summer was up"), she has married...
...group and the group that thought it was ridiculous to destroy some of those who, say, joined the party in the '30s in Nazi Germany. Duke and I were in the latter group." A risky place to be; when Wayne praised Larry Parks for admitting his Old Left indiscretions, Hedda Hopper bawled out the Duke publicly. He got the message. "I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia," he now declares. "They'd have been taken care of over there, and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first...