Theatre in Review: The Wild Duck (Theatre for a New Audience)

	David Patrick Kelly. Photo: Hollis King

We're in the middle of a full-tilt Henrik Ibsen revival thanks to recent starry stagings of A Doll's House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, which have yielded, to put it mildly, varying results. But leave it to Theatre for a New Audience to skip over the playwright's greatest hits for The Wild Duck, which hasn't had a major New York production since 1967. We need more companies willing to take a chance on canonical writers' lesser-known works, which often prove more revealing than the straight-off-the-shelf classics. Even if Simon Godwin's production doesn't fully capture the play's wildly ricocheting moods, its singular weave of farce and tragedy, it's still a thrill to see in a first-class production.

To be clear, The Wild Duck is an extraordinarily difficult play, missing no opportunity to tartly note its characters' foolish qualities while rushing toward unspeakable tragedy. Godwin and company zero in on the play's darker aspects, focusing on the muddleheaded do-gooder who, with the best of intentions, drives a family to ruin. It represents something of a turning point for Ibsen: In earlier works, like Pillars of Society, A Doll's House, and Ghosts, the playwright is intent on exposing the hypocrisies of Victorian morality. With The Wild Duck, he warns us that idealism can kill.

The play's chief troublemaker is Gregers Werle, the resentful son of Hakon, a crafty businessman and unfaithful husband who, in all probability, put Gregers' mother in an early grave. Werle also finessed his way out of a financial scandal, letting the blame fall on his former business partner Ekdal, keeping the broken man around as a part-time dogsbody. (The sight of David Patrick Kelly, as Ekdal, meandering across the stage, trailing sheets of paper, is a vivid glimpse of a living ghost, clinging to the military uniform that once lent him distinction.) Alexander Hurt, wounded and humorless as Gregers, and Robert Stanton, smooth and ulterior as Werle, engage in deft psychological shadow boxing. Werle's ostensibly affectionate mussing of his son's hair is, in fact, a patently theatrical gesture, chillingly unfelt; even more menacing is the moment when he grabs the young man by the scruff of his neck, holding him like a possession of dubious worth. Hurt, underplaying cannily, keeps Gregers' emotions in check, even in the face of a fatherly slap, until he erupts in fury, slamming his hand on a table in a gesture that signals an irrevocable break (and, at the performance I attended, seemingly damaged a piece of scenery).

Gregers' disgust at his father's manipulations propels the play's action, along with his searching need for a replacement hero figure. He finds one, or thinks he does, in Hjalmar, son of the elder Ekdal, who presides over an eccentric, not to say bizarre, household. A photographer by trade, Hjalmar is assisted by his wife, Gina, a skilled photo retoucher, who, incidentally, is Werle's former housekeeper. Hjalmar fritters away his time imagining the ill-defined invention that, he is convinced, will alter their fortunes. They care for the elderly Ekdal, who, deprived of his rural life, keeps a menagerie of animals in the second-floor loft of the family's studio-slash-apartment, staging indoor hunting sessions on rabbits and pigeons. Their heartbreakingly innocent adolescent daughter, Hedvig, lives solely for her father's approval and for the wounded bird of the title, which she tenderly keeps upstairs.

It's a frankly oddball setup, exacerbated by Hjalmar's ignorance; little does he know that his family has been carefully arranged (and largely financed) by that subtle puppet master Werle, for reasons of his own. There's plenty of comedy in these scenes, which Godwin's production doesn't fully embrace; at the performance I attended, the audience, uncertain how to respond, sometimes focused its laughter on Ibsen's old-fashioned plot carpentry, with its many coincidences, not the all-too-human foibles of Hjalmar and his loved ones. Nick Westrate, a fine actor, doesn't find the full extent of Hjamar's vanity and obliviousness; this has the effect of making him seem even more unreasonable when, brutally disillusioned, he turns on Gina and Hedvig, precipitating the play's final calamity.

Melanie Field as Gina, tending her husband nervously as he edges closer to the truth. And Maaike Laanstra-Corn is nothing less than shattering as Hedvig, who, slowly going blind, lives for her father's love. Her uncomprehending, nakedly vulnerable response when coldly dismissed by him is wrenching; when she falls into Gregers' clutches, urged on by him to commit an act that, he mind-bogglingly believes, will redeem the family, one wants to physically prevent her from following his lead.

It's a devilish web of motivations that Ibsen weaves; judge these characters at your peril. Gregers means well, but his "claim to the ideal" is really a way of striking out at his father. Werle is a corrupt old bear -- witness his sinister appearance in an overstuffed fur coat -- but oddly generous to those whom he harms; his relationship with the vulgar, yet candid, Mrs. Serby (Mahira Kakkar, fearlessly calling a spade a spade when confronted about her past) is a strange mirror image of Hjalmar's marriage, with its foundation of lies. It's a truism that love depends on the truth, yet Hjalmar, Gina, and Hedvig live fruitfully in their little world, and learning to see themselves as they are only brings misery. In Ibsen's view, we need "life-lies" to survive, yet they are opiates, not forms of fulfillment. To get this life, you must choose your poison.

Godwin's production is thoroughly straightforward, with the painted scenery of Act I giving way to Andrew Boyce's spacious, yet faintly seedy, loft set, its enormous skylight giving Stacey Derosier the room to create numerous sensitively rendered time-of-day looks. Heather C. Freedman's beautifully tailored costumes instantly clue us in regarding each character's social status. (The patchwork robe for old Ekdal is an especially neat touch.) Darron L West's sound design provides all the necessary effects, from voices at dinner to winds in a blizzard. One quibble: The violinist who appears between scenes is a lovely touch, but he often stands so close to a loudspeaker that his playing is heard twice with a distracting bit of latency. One wonders if he needs to be amplified at all.

If it's not a perfect production, well, ideal stagings of The Wild Duck are thin on the ground, and Godwin builds the action to a climax likely to haunt you for days. David Eldridge's highly playable version includes a line I haven't encountered before. Near the end, a sorrowing, fed-up Gina, hearing Hjalmar's cries to the unanswering heavens, bitterly notes, "God didn't do this. Men did." Is it a feminist comment? A malediction against humanity? Either way, this 1884 drama has much to say about the manipulations of the powerful and the torments that only fanatics can unleash. In a way, it's very much a play for today, and it promisingly kicks off the era of Arin Arbus, TFANA's new artistic director. --David Barbour