Ashland (part three)

The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Next to Midsummer's Night Dream, my biggest surprise fave at this year's Ashland Festival was The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, a relatively new play by Jeff Whitty, the Tony Award winning author of Avenue Q. It is significant that the new Artistic Director of the Ashland Festival, Bill Rauch, chose this particular play as the first one he would direct in this, his debut season as Artistic Director. That fact alone gives some indication of the importance of this play. I'm happy to say that the quality of this production is of the very highest caliber, and bodes well for Rauch's tenure.

This amazingly imaginative theater piece is a fantasy-meditation on the destiny of fictional characters in relation to the creative minds of their creators who give them life, and the theater-going (and reading) audience who keep them living for as long as they are still performed, read, and remembered. This is a really wonderful play which is well worth seeing, and I don't want to spoil it by giving away too much about its amazing twists and turns. Suffice it to say, our heroine is tired of shooting herself over and over again (by now, for over a century) in narcissistic, self-absorbed despair. Hedda longs for a way to change the course of her destiny in a new and happier direction. She therefore decides to set out to find the fiery furnace of creativity from whence she came, hoping for a "rewrite." Along the way, she (and the audience) discover a great deal about the nature of creativity, and how the fictional creations of literature affect and are affected by their audience over time. In the process, she (and we) also learn something about changing cultural stereotypes; the nature of classic timelessness versus merely transient popularity; and (somehow) even life itself and what it means to be truly alive.

Resplendent in the title role is the stunning Robin Goodrin Nordli, who not coincidentally also portrayed Hedda Gabler in Rauch's Ashland production of the Ibsen masterpiece five years ago. Nordli is alternately screamingly hilarious and genuinely moving as the unhappily married woman desperate to escape her tragic fate and find real happiness, even if it must be with her terminally boring husband Tesman. As she hurls herself passionately around the stage emoting in high tragi-comic dudgeon, she strikes poses like a classic tragedienne who finds herself caught in a Toulouse Lautrec poster. I absolutely loved this performance. Indeed, it was my favorite of any in the six productions we saw.

At the beginning of the play, Hedda awakens or "comes to" after once again shooting herself in the head ("But people don't do that sort of thing!") in the offstage, off-the-page world where fictional characters "live." She is nursed back to health (quickly -- she was never "really" dead) by her house servant, who is none other than Mammy from Gone With the Wind. In this role is Kimberly Scott, a newcomer to Ashland who originated the role in the premiere production at South Coast Repertory. Inspired by Hedda's search for a new destiny and what she learns from other more contemporary African-American characters she meets (including a wise-cracking very 21st century female police detective from Law and Order), Mammy gradually awakens to the possibility of escaping her white-created, stereotypical character and becoming a fully liberated black woman. Her journey of self-discovery and self-realization is perhaps the most moving part of this play. Scott's performance is perfect, and very nearly steals the show.

She has a lot of competition, though. One of the glories of this production is the wealth of amazing performances by the relatively small (seven person) cast, most of whom (aside from Nordli) portray more than one character. Outstanding are Kate Mulligan as, among others, Medea and Cassandra; Gregory Linington as, among others, Lovborg and Jesus Christ; Gwendolyn Mulamba as an amazing panoply of African-American characters, well known and forgotten; and, most especially, Anthony Heald (last year's Tartuffe) and Jonathan Haugen as a pair of flaming queens straight (pun intended) out of The Boys in the Band. The latter two serve as guides, companions and mentors to Hedda and Mammy as they journey toward their fatal encounter with the fiery furnace of creation.

If anyone reading this blog post ever has a chance to see The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, she or he should seize the opportunity by the throat. Better yet, go up to Ashland RIGHT NOW and see it. Judy and I have already purchased tickets to see it again in August.