RHYTHMS OF FARCE : A SATIRIC VIEW OF ‘HEDDA GABLER’ AT LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE

Hedda Gabler’s is no easy case, even today. What does she want and what would she do with it if she got it?

One thing she doesn’t want is to be in a comedy. But that is her fate for much of the evening at the La Jolla Playhouse. Emily Mann’s staging takes a satiric view of Hedda (Natalia Nogulich) and her friends--a jumpy group who talk! like! this! under the misapprehension that they are being vivacious. If these are the best people in town, it can’t be a very big one.

For a long time the rhythms are those of farce, and it’s surprising how well Ibsen’s play adapts to it. (The translation is by Mann’s husband, Gerry Bamman, who also plays Judge Brack, and by Irene B. Berman.)

For example, Hedda’s twerpy husband, Tesman (Nicholas Hormann), is always a figure of fun. But how often is it suggested that there’s something equally silly about Eilert Lovborg, the man that Hedda let get away? William Russ makes Lovborg as foolish a self-dramatizer as Hedda is, without Hedda’s gift for covering her tracks.

These are little people with big heads, much like the men and women in Chekhov’s plays. Hedda, as well. Actress Nogulich makes her a bundle of nerves, at first. She tries for high-and-mighty serenity, but finds herself bustling around like a mere-- ugh-- housewife.

What if she had a job? Ah! Nogulich brightens at the suggestion. And for a minute it seems that this is the moral of Mann’s production: Let women work and they won’t be silly.

But Mann does not reduce the play to a feminist case study. Given all the scope in the world, Hedda might still be a mischief maker--and a screw-up. Life will never be grand enough for her. The task at hand will never be worth doing.

She is saving herself for the real thing. It turns out to be her death, hiding in the red music room that we can just see through the black drapes. Hedda keeps drifting toward that room and eventually, it claims her.

But not until she has found herself. Rather like Macbeth, Nogulich’s Hedda discovers her center by choosing to do evil. She goes through those drapes with real dignity. But not before realizing--a realization I’ve never seen in the play up to now--that she could have made a life for herself with silly-sweet Tesman after all. That, however, would have meant capitulating to the ordinary, and Gen. Gabler’s daughter never surrenders.

What a play! It’s as hard to get to the bottom of as “Hamlet.” Mann’s reading is necessarily partial and will not be to everyone’s taste, particularly not to those who like to see Hedda as a tragedy queen from the moment the curtain goes up.

Perhaps her story is suburbanized a bit too much here. But this also makes it easier to apply to our experience. I heard a woman on the way out telling her husband that this proved why she had always preferred dull academics, “like you.” This is better than leaving an Ibsen play knowing only that one has seen A Classic.

Nogulich’s Hedda Gabler changes throughout the play. The supporting players do not but we come to see their characters in a different way--to realize how depraved Bamman’s Judge Brack really is, for example, and to see that Tesman’s Aunt Juliane (Sylvia Short) is indeed an admirable woman, if addled on the subject of new babies.

Short may overdo Aunt Juliane’s obsession; Bamman may overdo Brack’s bullying ironies, and Clare Wren may overdo the passivity of Lovborg’s helpmeet, Mrs. Elvsted. But in farce people do overdo things, so--given its premise--this is a well-acted production.

The design, by any measure, is outstanding. As in Ibsen’s script, everything is what it is but is also something else--the stove a mausoleum, the frost on the window a reminder of time, Hedda’s gowns an indication of the double bind she is in--her need both to provoke and to conceal. Jennifer von Mayrhauser designed the costumes, Thomas Lynch the settings, Pat Collins the lighting.

FOR THE RECORD: Tony Richardson is one of the best-known directors in the English-speaking theater. To call him Harrison, as I did in a second reference in Monday’s review of “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, was a bonehead error.

‘HEDDA GABLER’ Ibsen’s tragedy, at the La Jolla Playhouse. Translated by Gerry Bamman and Irene Berman. Director Emily Mann. Set Thomas Lynch. Costumes Jennifer von Mayrhauser. Lighting Pat Collins. Music and sound Michael S. Roth. Stage manager Wendy Chapin. Assistant director Ross Wasserman. East Coast casting Stanley Soble/Jason La Padura. West Coast casting Richard Pagano/Sharon Bialy. Made possible by a grant from the John M. and Sally B. Thornton Foundation. Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets $14-$20. Closes Aug. 1. Warren Theater, UC San Diego. (619) 534-3960.

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