Photos by Dean La Prairie. Tom, bottom: Mackenzie Kyle. Center: Ian Novak (from left), Kyle and Jon Steinhagen.
Men have their King Lear. For women, the Mount Everest of seminal tragic roles is surely Hedda Gabler. More than a century after Henrik Ibsen created the complex, doomed creature, actors, directors and audiences are still trying to figure her out.
Hedda is a victim of stultifying oppression, helplessly pinned by Victorian social mores like a butterfly to a board. She is also a master of manipulation who wields the very power of life and death over those she pulls into her orbit. With her middle class home and dutiful husband, she’s the very portrait of bourgeois conventionality. She’s also every inch the wild child, a pistol-packing heathen with a ferocious nature bound in a corset and cloaked by a demure smile. She loves with reckless, slavish passion and inflicts unconscionable cruelties on those she loves. She is, simply and with infinite complexity, extraordinary.
In tackling Hedda Gabler, Raven Theatre Co-Artistic Director Michael Menendian makes choices both ingeniously creative (the set) and solidly conventional (the overall staging). And while the ensemble is capable, there’s a crucial bit of miscasting that leaches the production of the pressure-cooker, loaded gun tension that should define it. The result? A Hedda that’s solid yet unextraordinary. 
Menendian begins the story with a wall of valises and trunks that open up to like a massive pop-up book to reveal Hedda’s fussy, cloyingly feminine dressing room, a comfortably appointed parlor and an antechamber of sorts that holds a burnished wood upright piano. Set designer Andrei Onegin’s work isn’t merely clever, it’s provocative and creative. In her new home, the newlywed Hedda is trapped in a gift box and wrapped up like a fragile present, tied down by red ribbons (there’s a huge red bow in her dressing room) and other beautiful trappings. She’s in a gilded cage.
With no-nonsense clarity, Menendian establishes the unholy combination of suffocation, rage, frustration and impotence that Hedda feels closing in on her like the walls of an airless tomb.
That all the men in her life are in love with Hedda is more irksome than exciting to her. Hedda’s husband George Tesman (Ian Novak, spot-on as a clueless well-meaning and pathetically adoring puppy of a man), family friend Judge Brack (Jon Steinhagen, just right as a pitiless, deadly snake waiting to strike) illustrate the annoying tedium of boring lovers while scholar Eilert Lovberg (Ian Paul Custer, feverishly fine as Hedda’s wild-eyed soul-mate) is a catalyst for unrecoverable heartbreak. It’s not a coincidence Ibsen named the play Hedda Gabler rather than Hedda Tesman.
Husband, friend and lover - all three men are drawn to Hedda like moths to a flame. Unfortunately, that flame isn’t as intense as Hedda’s character demands. This is a woman nearly mad for want of an outlet for her intellect and creativity, a woman who can only diffuse her inferno of personality by manipulating and destroying the lives of others. Confined by gender and circumstance to an airless life of petty housekeeping, Hedda is imploding with rage and hopelessness: She - can’t rest until she’s had the twisted satisfaction of making others equally, unbearably unhappy. Her actions are unconscionable, but to anyone who has railed at the unfairness of the world, they are not incomprehensible. Hedda might not understand her own motivations (“Why would I want to hurt that nice old lady?”), but the actor playing Hedda must make the audience understand them.
In this all-important role, MacKenzie Kyle is miscast. She’s simply appears too young and too fresh-faced to radiate the end-of-the-line desperation Hedda feels as the world closes in on her. This Hedda is a dewy beauty, still the ingénue and not convincing as a woman whose dancing days are behind her. Kyle captures Hedda as she might have been in the years before Ibsen’s tragedy begins – not as she is at the heart of it. Kyle is no lightweight – but in this production, she’s been cast just a few years too early. How we’d like to see her revisit Hedda a few years from now.
Hedda Gabbler continues through June 27 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark. Tickets are $25, $20, students and seniors. For more information, click here, go to www.raventheatre.com or call 773/338-2177.
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