By Bill Marx

It is always a pleasure to see Ibsen on stage, but this production of one of his masterpieces is generally humdrum.

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by the company from the translation by Edmund Gosse and William Archer. Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques. Staged by Apollinaire Theatre Company at the Chelsea Theatre Works, 189 Winnisimmet St., Chelsea, MA, through March 16.

Parker Jennings as Hedda and Conall Sahler as Tesman in the Apollinaire Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler. Photo: Danielle Fauteux Jacques

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler famously confesses that she only has one major talent: for boring herself to death. But she has proved to be anything but boring to generations of theatergoers and actresses since the play’s scandalous premiere in 1891, and the antiheroine’s furious rejection (yet docile acceptance) of society remains a compelling mystery. Why does Hedda take one of her father’s pistols and commit suicide at play’s end — is she a nihilist? a coward? a mental case? a martyr for female liberation? an aristocrat unable to live in a bourgeois society?

And what is Ibsen telling us in this masterpiece? Is Hedda’s fate the price women pay when they attempt to escape patriarchal control? Or is hers the inevitable demise of those who won’t settle for a conventional existence? For actresses, the role has accrued the same kind of majestic cachet as Hamlet has for actors — portraying the beautiful, headstrong Hedda is a formidable undertaking, one that calls for maneuvering through a thicket of opposed emotions: this is a fierce, petty, depressed, rebellious, conniving, and brilliant woman seemingly bent on the destruction of herself and others.

It is always a pleasure to see Ibsen on stage, and local opportunities have become increasingly rare over the years, aside from revivals of A Doll’s House. At a time of dwindling attention spans, theatergoers are expecting (demanding?) shorter evenings, and the length of the Norwegian master’s scripts are a problem. The Apollinaire Theatre Company production tackles that issue by cutting the play and doing without an intermission — this version clocks in at around an hour and 45 minutes. The troupe has adapted the first English translation — by writer Edmund Gosse and theater critic William Archer — and I am happy to report that the late Victorian creakiness of that text has been excised away. This version is sturdy, if a bit plain. I miss some of the color supplied by other translations, such as when Rolf Fjelde has Judge Brack proclaim that he is “the cock of the walk.”

That notion of plainness, even going through the motions, fits the rest of the humdrum ATC staging. The set is minimal, tossing aside some of the play’s trademark visuals. You won’t find a Freudian-fueled portrait of General Gabler hanging on the wall. And there’s no stove where Hedda tosses the only copy of Lövborg’s book, which contains his much-praised chronicle of the future. It is an act of symbolic infanticide: “Now I am burning your child, Thea! Your child and Eilert Lövborg’s. I am burning — I am burning your child”. In the 2001 Huntington Theatre Company staging, Kate Burton’s Hedda balled up the pages and slowly fed fistfuls into the flames, her face a mix of exhilaration, surprise, and fear at her demonic power. Here, Parker Jennings’s Hedda is given a flaring red light to work with. She offs the offending text with efficiency, as if she is slipping a letter under a door, like a mailman on his rounds. This is shockingly prosaic treatment of one of the greatest scenes in Ibsen.

Cristhian Mancinas-García as Brack, Joshua Lee Robinson as Lövborg, and Conall Sahler as Tesman in the Apollinaire Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler. Photo: Danielle Fauteux Jacques

Jennings’s performance has power, but it presents us with a Hedda who is perpetually angry, wheezing with irritated exasperation between scenes. This Hedda is pissed off, crabby as all get-out from the get-go: there’s no suggestion she is self-conscious about what she is doing, moments when she laughs at herself, or can put on the charming mask that is necessary for a society that demands ‘real’ feelings be camouflaged. The rest of the cast falls into rote grooves as well, though Paola Ferrer’s Aunt Julianna is admirable. Her do-gooder is much savvier than the usual well-meaning fuddy-duddy. You almost get the impression this Julianna brings up Hedda’s pregnancy so often because she likes making Hedda so darned frustrated. The other cast members are one-dimensional: Conall Sahler contributes a goofy-ish Tesman, Joshua Lee Robinson’s Lövborg comes off as a stiff, rather than unruly, reformed bad boy.

Cristhian Mancinas-García’s Brack is oily-to-the-max, a smug roué who insinuates his hands all over Hedda — he is an octopus. Ibsen’s scandalized audiences knew exactly what the “respectable” Brack was up to — he was adroitly plotting to make Hedda one of his harem. Why be so obvious, given that Ibsen treats language as a sly form of subterfuge? Desire is revealed — through disguise. Also, Jennings’s Hedda seems to be more than tough enough to bite the hand that gropes her. Finally, at the performance I attended, Mancinas-García flattened one of the finest ending lines in drama (an all-time favorite of Tony Kushner’s). The emphasis should be “People don’t do such things” not “People don’t do such things.” Brack’s tone should be incredulous, lightly gob-smacked — spoiled socialites like Hedda talk a good game about rebelling, but they don’t ever act. It is so distasteful, so gauche.

Aside from this ham-fistedness, director Danielle Fauteux Jacques supplies some imaginative touches. Hedda pushes the set’s furniture around between scenes, making the playing space increasingly empty, a powerful image of her psychological isolation. And, just before Jennings’s Hedda hands Lövborg one of her daddy’s pistols, she glances at where his manuscript has been hidden. Should she give it back to him? A moment, redolent of Greek tragedy, when disaster might have been averted, another road taken.

Of course, what makes this drama so remarkably prophetic is how Ibsen leaves us to grapple with what is driving Hedda’s radical belligerence. Lövborg’s future forecast is ash; perhaps what the dramatist is suggesting is that the privileged Hedda’s uncompromising demand for freedom and power and beauty — a liberation from social constraints, whatever the cost, even her own demise — is the real sign of what’s to come in the pampered world of the bourgeoisie.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.