Throwing Stones In Gabler’s Glass House

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The New York Sun

It’s a setting out of a Hitchcock film — an attractive, strangely airless space that stealthily presses in on the characters. Streamlined and gleaming, the stylish high-rise apartment revolves slowly on a turntable stage. Video images of foliage flicker on its one concrete wall, reflected in overhead mirrors. Rain pours down its long floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

And it’s this setting that gives Thomas Ostermeier’s darkly funny, revisionist “Hedda Gabler” its crystalline clarity. Gathered around a long, retro-chic green sofa in an open loft space, the characters look like plastic figures in a scale model of a 1950s modernist glass house — except for their cell phones and laptops. It’s as if Hedda and her circle have been trapped like insects under glass, the better for us to study their every move.

Mr. Ostermeier, one of the artistic directors of West Berlin’s estimable Schaubühne, is known for bold choices. In his previous Ibsen revival, “Nora,” which played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music two years ago, he radically reimagined “A Doll’s House,” replacing the slamming door with a gunshot.

It’s no surprise, then, that he’s taken a paring knife to “Hedda Gabler,” slicing off the servant character and slashing most of Aunt Juliane’s lines to clear space for the five principals. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s spare text (performed in German, with surtitles) cuts directly to the heart of the scenes, dispensing with minor subplots that might clutter the playing field. The result is a “Hedda Gabler” whose movements are sleek and clear, like the diagrams a sports coach draws on a clipboard. And like such diagrams, it’s also a little distanced and bloodless.

We don’t feel affection or compassion for this Hedda. Instead we feel the fascination — Hitchcock again — of spotting the hard glint in her eye, of tracking the sharp turns of her pretty mouth, of wondering what she’ll do next.

This 20-something Hedda is a 21st-century newlywed; she comes to breakfast in low-rise sweatpants and a little sweater, and browses her honeymoon photos on her husband’s laptop. The young German actress who plays Hedda, Katharina Schüttler, has a nervy energy to match Hedda’s own. A voluptuous sensuality oozes out of her size-two body as she leans against a wall with feline laziness — only to be counteracted by her violent aversion to physical touch.

Ms. Schüttler’s complex portrayal suggests an upper-middle-class child of the electronic age, whose senses have been blunted by a life of comfortable consumption and passive entertainment. To keep the creature comforts flowing, she’s married the naïve, warmhearted Tesman (Lars Eidinger), a dull, balding academic who’s been assured a well-paid university job. But long days alone in her luxurious apartment (bought on credit by the still-unemployed Tesman) leave her feeling enervated and tetchy. Underneath her sardonic, wan exterior, she seethes — probably at life itself, for forcing the unsavory choice between her material needs (satisfied by Tesman) and the passion she once felt for Tesman’s academic rival, the hard-drinking Eilert Løvborg (Kay Bartholomäus Schulze).

In Mr. Ostermeier’s production, Hedda’s startling impulses flow out of her ennui. Bored and alone in that annoyingly luminous apartment, she unpacks one of her father’s pistols and shoots two flower vases, sending the shards flying across the stage. This is more than a piece of shocking stage business. As she loads and reloads the pistol, aiming at various spots, we get a sense of her mind working, ticking off targets and testing her aim. Just barely, one can make out the woman of action beneath the loungewear.

There’s an element of warped playfulness to Hedda’s outbursts. When she gets into a tussle with her rival for Løvborg’s attentions, Mrs. Elvsted (Annedore Bauer), their physical struggle degenerates into a kind of playground fight. Later, after wrestling her way out of an implied rape attempt by her neighbor, Brack (Jörg Hartmann), the victorious Hedda unexpectedly hands the vanquished foe his glasses. When (in an inspired update of the manuscript-burning scene) she takes a hammer to Løvborg’s laptop, she does it with a kind of determined glee.

Cumulatively, Hedda’s quirks suggest a lack of a clear-cut internal compass. Despite all her talk of power and plans, this young, inexperienced Hedda lives moment to moment. Like a true child of media, she seems to find it unlikely that a bullet might actually kill — unconsciously, though, she’s powerfully attracted to the possibility of breaking through malaise by drawing blood. To the end, Mr. Ostermeier’s Hedda seems oddly detached from reality — one of those spoiled pretty girls from high school who never figured out that someone actually has to pay the credit card bill.

The detachment doesn’t stop with Hedda. In the production’s radical ending, when Hedda fires a bullet into her head behind the set’s lone concrete wall, her companions, chatting in the next room, don’t rush in to find her. The line readings suggest that Tesman and the others assume Hedda’s just playing with pistols again. As a Beach Boys song plays, the stage revolves to show Hedda slumped against the wall while the others chatter on. It’s a vivid image of a nonchalant, almost insensate youth culture.

Pared down to its stark elements, the climactic scene eschews melodrama in favor of cool-eyed, almost mercenary contrast. It’s a fitting ending for Mr. Ostermeier’s strikingly contemporary “Hedda Gabler,” whose sharp images — like Ibsen’s Hedda herself — lodge themselves forcefully in the theatergoer’s mind.

Until December 2 (BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).


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