Hedda Gabler isn’t interesting if she’s simply a furious psychotic, but that’s how she’s being framed in the suffocating new production at Studio Theatre. In 1890, Henrik Ibsen wrote a towering and difficult play about a woman hemmed in by society and tormented by her own conflicting impulses. Here, we’re all just trapped inside her volcanic head.
That makes the show monotonous as Hedda reflexively rips into everyone and never stops. The problem doesn't seem to be the new adaptation of "Hedda Gabler" by Irish dramatist Mark O'Rowe, which accentuates Ibsen's clipped rhythms and makes the dialogue a touch more colloquial. The writing still sounds like Ibsen, right down to the famous phrases about "vine leaves in his hair" as Hedda fantasizes about driving an old flame to perverse glory and "I'm burning your baby" as Hedda commits one of her drastic acts.
Instead, the issue seems to be the modern styling and expressionist tilt chosen by director Matt Torney. The house for the fashionable Hedda and her mismatched new husband, the wonky scholar Jorge Tesman, is polished and angular in Luciana Stecconi's too-slick cell of a set, with tall, smoked-glass doors at the back that never let in daylight even when Hedda grouses about the sun. The lighting reflects Hedda's mercurial moods, and so do the menacing hums and growls of the sound design. Understated would be the wrong word.
The hip furniture includes a sharply rectangular gray couch upon which Julia Coffey's jittery Hedda curls like cat ready to pounce. Avery Clark, who largely manages to keep Tesman from being just a nattering academic ninny, wears tailored jeans (the sharp costumes are by Murell Horton). Tesman's intellectual and romantic rival, Ejlert Lovborg, terrifically played by Shane Kenyon, looks like a trendy magazine's version of a rugged writer, with his hiking boots and scarf and expensive-looking rumpled T-shirt.
These contemporary touches here partly undermine the play, which was set in the late 19th century for the debut of O’Rowe’s version last year at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre (a company that happens to be at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday and Thursday performing Sean O’Casey’s “The Plough and the Stars”). The bigger issue that the design underlines is the constricted interpretation of the play.
Ibsen never really explains Hedda, who outraged audiences of his era as she recoils from her own pregnancy, toys with her late military father’s guns, flirts with the power-hungry family friend Judge Brack, manipulates Lovborg’s devoted lover, Thea Elvsted, and willfully ruins the genius writer Lovborg. (There’s your plot refresher.) But Ibsen packs Hedda’s environment with lots of clues, among them a strong paternal upbringing and limited creative possibilities for women. This show flies past a lot of contributing factors as it burrows single-mindedly into Hedda’s neurotic impulses.
Coffey is lightning fast at this, purring at Thea one second and snapping at Tesman the next, while also infusing the performance with Hedda’s keen but wildly directed energy; Coffey fills the small stage with a restless muscular presence. The malleability is admirable, but it’s also mechanical, through no fault of Coffey’s. She is not asked to connect the dots, which is the great mysterious challenge of the role, but to make each one piercingly clear, which just makes Hedda a raving mess.
Clark also is proficient with the show’s rapid low-key and lash-out style, and Kenyon manages a surprisingly supple performance as Lovborg, who still carries a torch for Hedda (which of course she uses to burn him). Even so, a murmured intimate conversation that Kenyon and Coffey share just before intermission goes wrong in ways that have nothing to do with the acting. The sound that hums under them turns their exchange melodramatic, even tipping it toward soap opera. Then it approaches Gothic horror as sinister organ music intrudes, a footlight effect gives the stage a creepy glow and Hedda . . . goes . . . mad!
“It’s very stressful,” two young men agreed at intermission Tuesday night. That’s the note this airless, nervous show drills home.
Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, new version by Mark O'Rowe. Directed by Matt Torney. Lights, Scott Zielinski; sound, Fitz Patton. With Kimberly Schraf, Rosemary Regan, Kimiye Corwin and Michael Early. About 2 hours and 20 minutes. Through June 19 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Tickets: $49-$91, subject to change. Call 202-332-3300 or visit studiotheatre.org.
