Hedda Gabler

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

Not one of them can be trusted, well maybe George Tessman (Josh Hartwell), but he’s so wrapped up in his academic world he wouldn’t recognize trust if it sneaked up behind him and nipped him on the ankle. So detached from anyone’s reality except his own, he probably wouldn’t recognize he had been assaulted at all.

Paragon Theatre Company’s production of Hedda Gabler.

Paragon Theatre earned its reputation right out of the starting gate in producing quality plays paying attention to details and developing excruciatingly-defined characters.

Their current production, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler running at The Phoenix Theatre through November 4 takes the breath away, gives it back, and then takes it away again.

Under the superb direction of Warren Sherrill, Hedda vibrates through a variety of social themes engulfing an everyman’s society with explicit characterizations.

Although Ibsen wrote Hedda in Norwegian in 1890, it rocks as tough as though it had just been written in time for Paragon to stage it. The original script full of untranslatable word play, Doug Hughes’ English translation allows the highly incisive cast to capture the untranslatable with their eyes and body language. The little things accomplished on stage defy translation in any language. The truth is actors either have it or they don’t. This cast has it for every single moment the stage lights are up and the house lights are down.

George and his gorgeous wife, Hedda Gabler Tessman (Barbara Andrews) have just returned from a six month Honeymoon to a house beautiful dressed in white. (No dog lives there. No dog would want to.)

Ask George, and he will tell you the six months were pure reverie. That’s what he tells his nosey Aunt Juliana played with deliberate digging nosiness by Patty Mintz Figel. After all, Juliana raised George, continuing to assist him financially giving her the self-made right to know everything right now. So right now she appears early the morning after George and Hedda return from their long trip. Figel clips Juliana with staccato busyness aiding Berta’s (Karen Kargel) anxieties. Berta, very much a part of George’s upbringing, worked for Juliana many years. She fears Hedda who can’t be pleased on any level, and she has good reason.

Hedda can’t be pleased, won’t be pleased, and refuses all opportunities to be pleased aptly confusing social identity with personal satisfaction.

Hartwell climbs inside of George, folding him inward, a learned man expecting to be named professor wraps himself in a professor’s inward grasp unable to see beyond his books and his nose.

He is most aware he has a gorgeous wife, and living on a hope and a dream of expectation, buys the house with the help of Juliana, Hedda flippantly one night tells him she wanted to live in it. With his nose in his books, he will grovel for anything to make her happy, convinced he has done so. Oh how naive book smarts can be.

Hedda doesn’t love the house. She doesn’t even like it. She doesn’t even love George. Love doesn’t seem to be in her vocabulary over anything. He promised a sense of security, and she grabbed on.

Hedda plays with people as a cat with a mouse before a final pounce of juicy delight. Andrews wears Hedda with glistening glee from the darting of her eyes, to the carefully controlled and splashy always-on-stage flamboyant body language. Every move she makes no matter how subtle no matter how outrageous she cunningly scrutinizes before flaunting teasing conniving behavior.

What would give her meaning? Power over someone, and when she doesn’t control the power, boredom beats her over the head like a 2 x 4.

Living in a pool of frightened nervousness, Kate Avallone, absorbs the undone essence of Mrs. Thea Elvsted, who has left her brutal senator husband and has come to inform the Tessman’s that George’s arch academic rival is in town. Not wanting to talk details, Hedda, always with a sly smile plastered across her face, convinces George to leave the room, while she soaps the way for her once upon a time school acquaintance to tell her everything. Mrs. Elvstead slips into Hedda’s web without realizing she has slipped into anything.

Early Hedda Gabler critics insisted no woman on earth could come close to representing Hedda. When in fact Hedda probably was present when humankind first climbed out of the ocean insisting her crustacean husband find a cave too luxurious for them to occupy. An original desperate housewife, every society has held court with a Hedda in one form or another. Ibsen had the piercing eyes to see and identify. Perhaps the critic who wrote those words was actually living with one too wrapped up in his work to see beyond the nose on his face. Well, it’s a possibility.

Oiled in a smirk of a different power, but power just the same, Jarrad Holbrook takes on Judge Brack with a slice of rotten intent. Lusting hungrily after Hedda, she plays keenly upon his advances, while he takes delight in firing up George’s anxieties over the competition between Eilert Lovborg and George for a professorship.

Yes, Eilert Lovborg, who has returned from his alcoholic self-imposed grave to write a highly successful book. The object of Mrs. Elvsted’s uncanny affected attention, Lovborg temporarily regains his dignity. Jeremy Make captures Lovborg’s internal and external contrived modus operandi. Innocent in some ways, crawling with licentious eyes toward Hedda in others, riding a hobbyhorse of self-destructive confidence flaunting his short-lived success, Hedda remains aloof yet toys diligently with him.

Complications breed complications while Hedda deliciously digs out devious confidences from everyone involved, pits everyone against each other, appearing as a heroine if only to herself. She likes nothing, unable to love anyone, but thoroughly enjoys steamrolling the squirming she creates. Caught up in her hungry capacity to control, she steamrolls across lines she doesn’t contemplate entertaining, handing the Judge reins to her power trapping her in her own web.

Christopher Wink demonstrates his creative imagination in designing the gorgeous white set that no self respecting dog would want to live in oozing with its out of reach financial status a would-be almost but not quite professor could afford. Jen Orf matches the internal conflict whirling around the white set with her stark lighting design.

Hedda Gabler dives headfirst into a deceptive psychological portrait of human nature splashed with primary colors and ever so subtle shadings of off-color numbing pastels.

Hedda Gabler is a sheer masterpiece for Paragon, for Sherrill and the brilliant artistic cast that reaches into the depth of power, control and desperation, while painting revealing portraits of toxic characters who live and breathe in their own world sharing their toxicity with every society known to humankind.

Pistols play a part in giddy childish play and giddied escalated consequences.

For one who plays with fire up close and personal on a dangerous level, Hedda fears scandal most of all. Riveted by the broad strokes, engrossed by shaded dabs, every move, every breath, every half-smile exhibited by the characters takes on a specified complex meaning of its own.

A definite must see Hedda Gabler written by Ibsen, translated by Hughes, and given penetrating life by Paragon shines a bright spotlight into a defining element of human nature./p>