From Grandeur to the Garret the Wild Duck

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Classics are intimidating. Directors often hesitate to stage them unless there is a way to reinvent the texts as contemporary, or at least to impose some setting and style not obviously intended by the author. Every production needs a point of view, to be sure; no play mounts itself. Yet exciting interpretations almost always result not from invention but from rediscovering something the playwright meant to say. That kind of respectful reading underlies Rumanian Expatriate Lucian Pintilie's eclectic, visually daring version of Ibsen's The Wild Duck at Arena Stage in Washington. The play is frequently seen as a domestic melodrama in which well-intentioned people cause calamities; the climactic suicide of a dreamy adolescent girl is generally staged with perverse beauty, as a sentimental symbol of how adult reality crushes freedom of spirit. Pintilie, who brings an Eastern European's Marxist sensibility, has exposed a vein of social criticism about the corrosive effects of wealth and envy.

The result is as striking as his celebrated Tartuffe, staged in 1984 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and in 1985 at Arena. In that reappraisal, Pintilie awakened contemporary audiences to the play's political dimensions, its defense of civil liberties in a nation beset by conspiracies and denunciations. In Pintilie's free but faithful adaptation of The Wild Duck, the playgoer finds himself immersed in a world of coarse, rapacious robber barons who believe the disgrace in any swindle lies in getting caught. The most pitiable figure imaginable to them is someone who has fallen from luxury. Thus the privation of the ruined Ekdal family and the shame they feel at taking handouts from their former business partners, the Werles, permeate every emotional connection in the play. The Werles' first-act party takes place in shadow behind a mirrored wall, which later turns out also to have concealed the grim garret where the Ekdals live. When the action shifts there, lush red drapes bordering the stage drop to the floor, as if a veil were ripped aside to reveal reality. The staircase leading from the living floor to the aerie where the Ekdals keep caged birds, including the duck of the title, is a noisy, bone-jouncing climb. The family's photo business consists of little more than a giant lamp that can be swung around to shine in the eyes of whoever is being addressed or accused, including the audience.

Suffering has not ennobled the Ekdals. As played with ruthless candor by Richard Bauer, the father is a self-pitying drunk. His wife (Tana Hicken), prematurely gray and hardened, thinks only of money and business. Their daughter (Rebecca Ellens) is a fanciful child who has learned none of the % social graces. The self-proclaimed idealism of their friend Gregers Werle (Christopher McCann)--who moves in and reorders their lives with disastrous consequences--mingles religious fanaticism with a rich man's easy disdain for money. Fittingly, the production ends without the comfort of catharsis, in a fistfight between the unrepentant Gregers and a neighbor, a drunken but discerning doctor. The incidents come basically from Ibsen, conveyed with a rawness modern audiences rarely see in his work. Even in this highly symbolic play, he makes a harrowing social realist.