Hedda Gabler

Play (1891)
by Henrik Ibsen
Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques
Apollinaire Theater Company
Chelsea, MA
February 21 – March 16, 2025

With Parker Jennings (Hedda), Conall Sahler (George Tesman), Cristhian Mancinas-García (Brack), Joshua Lee Robinson (Lovborg), Kimberly Blaise MacCormack (Thea), Paola Ferrer (Julianna), Ann Carpenter (Berta)

Scenic and Sound Design: Joseph Lark-Riley; Costume Design: Elizabeth Rocha; Lighting Design: Danielle Fauteux Jacques

Hedda (Parker Jennings) is married to George Tesman (Conall Sahler), a not bad but feckless writer and scholar whom she seems to barely tolerate. As things unfold, it becomes evident that her amorous life is more varied. On the one hand, she has ministrations from Judge Brack (Cristhian Mancinas-García), not much to her liking, and has had a steamy romance with Lovborg (Joshua Lee Robinson) whom she is clearly not over.

But there are lots of knots. Lovborg, another writer and scholar, has written a new manuscript that portends greatness and it appears that he has written it with Thea’s (Kimberly Blaise MacCormack) help. This irritates Hedda no end, and when Lovborg misplaces his manuscript it gives George the opportunity to take advantage of his competitor and the opportunity for Hedda to get back at her old lover for consorting with Thea.

As though that were not enough, Hedda plays around with guns and is not averse to passing them around. Meanwhile, George and Thea take off on a project together, and none of this is very pleasing to Hedda who sees limited options all around her, with Brack hanging over her with lots of cards in his hand and an unpleasantly imposing libido.

This is a grim play, indeed, but so grim that one just has to go for it and get down there, deep into it, reveling in all of Ibsen’s machinations about cruelty. At each turn, when one thinks that things couldn’t get worse, they surely do. And Hedda holds this together with a perverse destructiveness that is equally applied to those around her and to herself. Her malevolence and insidiousness is nicely matched by Brack who would seem a perfect, and perfectly insidious, consort, but she is not interested in partnering with him. Instead, her heart belongs to Lovborg, who wanders elsewhere.

This nicely staged adaptation of the original takes place in one long act, about an hour and forty-five minutes long, a quite sizable reduction of the original, but artfully enough excised and compacted to make it work. Things that in the full-length version take awhile to play out, here bang upon one another in rapid succession, so one has to get with that program to fully digest the result. Consequently, things don’t have a chance to simmer, they simply boil. And when they boil, they really boil. This induction stove suddenness actually works quite well in this carefully curated production but it is indeed a bit faster and more furious than the slow though tortuous slog in the long Scandinavian night that Ibsen details.

As Hedda, Parker Jennings has a dense and furious intensity that brews beneath a surface which she maintains with a considerable degree of public appeal but not much inner decency. Poor George’s Aunt Julianna (Paola Ferrer), just wants to be close to the newly married pair, but nothing doing from Hedda, who insults, and then confesses to insulting, the poor aunt intentionally. Oh well, good old George carries on with a dim optimism that carries him through, and Conall Sahler does a fine job of making this Teflon character run through the stickies without a trace.

As the malevolent Judge Brack, Cristhian Mancinas-García is perfectly dark and nasty in a deftly political way, capturing some of the mastery of that talent so evident on certain public political stages at the moment. As Lovborg, Joshua Lee Robinson simmers, causing Hedda to practically pop out of her drawers on sighting him. We don’t get enough of a sense in this abbreviated version about what has gone between them and what makes it so intense, but the evidence is there, and Robinson and Jennings give enough sense of that percolating potion to make even the suggestion of something brewing pretty steamy.

Kimberly Blaise MacCormack as Thea is the dutiful maidservant first to Lovborg then to George Tesman and she is fine in her self-appointed second-fiddling. And as Aunt Julianna who has a good run at nudging Hedda and George to have a child early on, Paola Ferrer performs dutifully and effectively but, per Ibsen and this production’s choices, then passes into the narrative woodwork.

Joseph Lark-Riley has provided some great sound design in this show, with subliminal hums that create an aura of ominousness, but there was also seemingly a lot of wind outside – though it was hard to tell what was intended and what was environmental – and some of the effects seemed to blend in with some of that. But what was discernibly intentional seemed very well done. The simple set, also by Lark-Riley, is effective and to the point, and the costumes by Elizabeth Rocha are elegantly conceived, a distinct embellishment to the setting.

This is a potent and thoughtful rendition of the Ibsen classic and its trimmed-down version offers a kind of espresso-like potency which gives it punch and pizzazz.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)