April 14-20, 2005

theater

If These Walls Couldn't Talk

by Toby Zinman

Theater review

Hedda Without Walls. Well, walls isn't all this Hedda is missing: Hedda without an intelligible script. Hedda without capable actors. Hedda without subtlety. Why playwright (I use the term loosely) Armen Pandola decided Ibsen needed his help is beyond me, although apparently that most repulsive of all impulses, relevance, is part of it. The "here and now," as the program announces.

Ibsen's masterwork, Hedda Gabler, is about a restless young woman, all fire and ice, profoundly unstable and discontented with her life, who is torn between the world of her cautious, kind, dull, bourgeois husband, Tesman, and the dangerous thwarted genius, Lovborg. Her powerful dead father, the General, who still dominates her spirit (the play's title, is, after all, Hedda Gabler, not Hedda Tesman) is represented by his friend, the slimy, sophisticated Judge Brack. When she shoots herself in the end, it is a complex act, simultaneously a refusal to be confined by male power and a terrifying gesture of careless waste and futility. Does that sound like it needs relevance added?

Pandola's device is to have the theater company performing his contemporary Hedda work out its own parallel drama in the visible wings; the Lovborg equivalent is a drug dealer and lap-dance addict (no sign of vine leaves in his hair) who is having an affair with the highly disturbed actress playing the updated Hedda, who is running around with a loaded pistol. The actor playing the supposed Tesman figure is a moronic school teacher whose idealism wouldn't convince a puppy to trust him. The Judge Brack lookalike is a sleazy sexual predator who is obviously despised by the rest of the cast. We find all this out by watching the actors, in the "wings" for 10 minutes at the beginning of each act while they do nothing but mutter conversation we cannot hear, supposedly to establish their characters. When they do talk audibly, intercut with the action "onstage," it is such puerile whining that the political agenda of the play, laid on with a heavy hand as it is, becomes intolerable.

The cast, with the exception of Peter Miltz, is entirely amateurish and awkward. This is not, by an stretch of generous impulse, professional theater.

HEDDA WITHOUT WALLS Through April 24, Green Light Theatrical Productions, 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., www.greenlightplays.com