WET detonates Ibsen's Hedda Gabler
Two years in the making, blahblahblahBANG, an ambitious show by Washington Ensemble Theater, is a high-profile step for an edgy and accomplished Seattle theater company. It's full of brilliant bits in the course of a radical reworking of a classic play.
It's hardly unusual for a smart young theater company to apply its edgy vision to the classics. But blahblahblahBANG, the latest project by Washington Ensemble Theatre (WET), aspires to be more than just a clever new interpretation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.
The show, two years in the making, presents a kind of ensemble self-portrait: a summa of WET's aesthetic preoccupations and stylistic tics. Moreover, this commission by On the Boards is a high-profile step. It marks the first production – since the company was launched in 2004 – to be staged outside the confines of WET's tiny black box home (Capitol Hill's Little Theatre).
The enthusiasm WET brings to the project is so palpable that you expect it to brim with memorable epiphanies. Instead, the result is a clear case of the whole seeming considerably less than the sum of its parts, intriguing as these are in many instances. And perhaps that's part of the vision intended by playwright Matt Starritt, collaborating with the WET ensemble, in this radical reworking of Ibsen's script: to underline the fundamentally ungraspable nature of this theatrical icon, which eludes being reduced to whatever fixed ideas each generation tries to lasso her with.
"Written by Ibsen ... destroyed by WET" runs the company's tongue-in-cheek tag. But blahblahblahBANG probes its source far too closely for missing clues, for subtexts and meanings hidden between the lines, to give even the illusion of wanting to efface the enigmatic appeal of Ibsen's 1890 tragedy. This isn't a postmodern deconstruction along the lines of, say, Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine or The Wooster Group's mixed-media tangents on Racine's Phèdre, titled To You, the Birdie! (which appeared on tour at On the Boards a few years ago).
What Starritt and colleagues are after is to detonate theatrical conventions–a goal which Ibsen himself accomplished, with such success that he in turn established a new set of conventions.
A peremptory "Shut the fuck up!" sets up an opening voiceover from the newly married Hedda (Marya Sea Kaminski), returning from her honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman (Lathrop Walker). Her dreamy voice, accompanied by sounds of train travel, is rife with clichés about an impending journey of self-discovery. But the gears soon shift, as they do throughout the evening with dizzying speed. Characters begin to converse normally and then suddenly inject mannered gestures. They interact with each other in stylized parodies of social behavior, while events jump-cut from real time to dream time and back with no warning.
Along the way, WET's actors resort to an eclectic spectrum of theatrical sources, including theater of the absurd, Dada, melodrama, and Brechtian alienation. Even circus performance art makes an appearance when Hedda fantasizes her husband's rival, Eilert Løvborg (Colin Byrne), undergoing a "beautiful death" in the form of an elaborate acrobatic solo as he hangs from blood-red draperies. The ascot-clad Byrne brings a metrosexual flair to Løvborg's not-quite-reformed romantic poses.
By the same token, Starritt's text sets in-your-face vulgarities side by side with formal 19th-century discourse and insistently repeated, minimalist phrases. He and Zeyl also give considerable space–despite the implications of the title blahblahblahBANG–to wordless moments. Whole sections of the play unfold as visual arias against an ongoing soundtrack of Radiohead and early David Bowie.
Holding this profusion of styles together, more or less, is the presiding surrealism of the unit set (co-designed by Lathrop Walker and Jennifer Zeyl) and costumes (Heidi Ganser). Blue walls slant at ominous angles, like something from an expressionist film. They box in the appropriately claustrophobic space, with the audience seated on either side of the narrow stage, seeing through the actors. The walls are decorated with creepy black floral patterns, empty picture frames, and second-storey windows. Judge Brack (Scott Jamrog) is partial to the handholds which allow him literally to climb the walls–as does Hedda before her final act of self-destruction.
One of the many puzzles the production lays bare but has no intentions to resolve is Hedda's place within these confines–which are further connected to a recurrent visual metaphor of nesting (Tesman's Aunt Julie plops randomly scattered eggs into her nestlike, plumed hat, while Løvborg's ill-fated manuscript is emblazoned with an egg shape). Kaminski's often-brilliant portrayal veers effortlessly from one facet to another, yet the one quality which seems deliberately deemphasized is Hedda's notorious boredom, however often she announces it.
This is a Hedda who hardly seems hemmed in by her situation and who, in contrast to Ibsen's script, rarely refers to her maiden name Gabler (even if she does sport large-letter "HG" earrings). Her volatility keeps everyone on edge–including her distractedly fast-talking husband, played with zany comic timing by Walker, who darts about in a pinstripe suit festooned with ridiculously dainty flower embroideries. No one quite knows how to react to her and her twisted logic.
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