Hedda Gabler

ALBUM OF THE YEAR Custer and Kyle compare notes.

Andrei Onegin’s ingenious set design for Raven’s staging of Ibsen’s 1890 play features a looming wooden cabinet that unfolds into a quietly ornate scene of bourgeois comfort. But all is not well in the home of newly minted Ph.D. George Tesman (Novak) and his new bride, the former Hedda Gabler (Kyle); for one thing, people keep bringing up pistols. Ibsen’s smoldering drama lingers on the verge of bedroom farce: The puppyish Tesman awkwardly plays down his former relationship with the visiting Mrs. Elvsted, petulant Hedda can barely conceal her contempt for her husband and her yearning for the dashing Eilert Lovborg (Custer), and the insidious Judge Brack (Jon Steinhagen) keeps popping in through the back window. In the end, though, the brittle social conventions of turn-of-the-century Norway conspire with a vogue for suicide to render the proceedings’ mirth bitterly hollow.

Raven’s production enjoys the commanding presence of Kyle, witheringly self-assured and gleefully perverse. The various attentions of the play’s men—Lovborg’s dreamy passion, Tesman’s fawning abasement and the judge’s sleazy scheming—all seem understandable responses to Hedda’s frosty hauteur. Kyle doesn’t entirely sound the character’s formidable depths, however. Henry James described Hedda as “various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural,” but in this production, she remains a touch too malignantly bitchy. Part of the difficulty may be that, with the exception of Steinhagen’s magnificently unctuous judge, the supporting characters in this briskly paced production lack Hedda’s vivid presence.

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