Tradition vs. Transistors

Carolyn Baeumler in Heddatron. Photo Joan Marcus. Courtesy Les Freres Corbusier.

An awful lot has come and gone between 1890 and today, but Hedda Gabler has stubbornly held on. A neat 100 years after the death of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, New York City is in the throes of a Hedda infatuation. Last week saw the opening of a classical staging of the play starring Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, and the curtain fell for the final time on a radical reworking featuring a monkey, slugs and robots.   Ibsen’s play is quite possibly the most awkward portrait of matrimony in European drama, and yet there’s still some comfort to be found in it. Marriage as an institution is now more uncertain than ever, but as an industry it’s an unassailable juggernaut. Our televisions are glutted with gloopy reality wedding programs and our friends are taking years off work to oversee centerpieces and napkin hues. At a time when an unsettlingly high portion of weddings seem to be more bling than bliss, it’s only natural that we’ve returned to the most desperate housewife of them all: the reluctantly married Hedda Gabler.

Ibsen’s play begins with our heroine and her husband, Jörgen Tesman, returning home from a six-month-long honeymoon. Jörgen, a PhD candidate who is studying domestic handicrafts of the Middle Ages, is a dense, dopey creature, unaware that his marriage is loveless. The pair soon learns that the scholar Ejlert Lövborg, Jörgen’s rival — and Hedda’s true love — has published an outstanding book and is now living nearby. Oblivious to the threat posed by Ejlert, Jörgen welcomes him into his home. Hedda can’t resist playing her companions like string puppets and spends the remainder of the play telling lies and withholding truths until she has reduced their lives to ruins. When Judge Brack, a smarmy friend of the couple, discovers that Hedda has burned Ejlert’s new manuscript, he gives her the choice between becoming his lover or being turned in for her crime. She picks a third option and points a gun to her head.

In 1890, theatergoers were used to problem plays, in which characters could surmount their troubles by the final curtain. Norwegian audiences were flummoxed by Ibsen’s provocative new project — it was received as a revolutionary cry, and not unanimously loved. When the play was staged in London the following year, critics responded sourly. One of the more charitable reviews, from Lloyd’s News, said, “It is not, possibly, so utterly repulsive as others that have been seen, but, nevertheless, it is offensive.”

Cate Blanchett in Hedda Gabler. Photo Richard Termine. Courtesy Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Today the play’s spare style seems relatively mild, and yet stage actors are still clambering to play Hedda. Yes, she wrings her hands and stirs up trouble, but she never comes to a full boil. (When she finally kills herself, it happens offstage.) The Sydney Theatre Company’s wonderful version — i.e., the one starring Blanchett — is still true to period, but the dialogue has been rounded out and pumped for colour and feeling. Blanchett’s Hedda is a coy and playful creature, calling to mind a stir-crazy Zelda Fitzgerald as she trips around and toys with her visitors. The production carries notes of a drawing room comedy, with awkward remarks spun into witty banter, and Ibsen’s carefully buried clues and symbols now appearing as full conversations.

Another superb interpretation of Hedda Gabler, the just-closed Heddatron, takes the art of adaptation in the opposite direction. Rather than concerning itself with smoothing out the original’s rough edges, Heddatron throws in even more chaotic elements. Of these herky-jerky touches, the hardest to overlook is that half the cast is robots. Not actors dressed up as robots, mind you. Real screws-and-soup-cans robots. Heddatron was put on by Les Freres Corbusier, an avant-garde theatre company that has made a name for injecting its madcap sensibility into serious subjects (previous projects were a noir-musical about urban planner Robert Moses and a children’s Christmas play about L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology).

Heddatron darts around between three modern-day locations: Ypsilanti, Mich., Henrik Ibsen’s household in 1890 Norway and a remote part of the Ecuadorian rainforest where robots exercise free will and speak only lines from Ibsen’s script.

When the theatre lights go down, the audience is treated to a short video about “singularity,” the moment when a robot achieves self-awareness and is no longer taking orders from humans. In the 1890 scenes, Ibsen (incorporated as an actor in his own play) is a mutton-chopped weakling, tormented by his bossy wife, his sexy maid, and his archrival August Strindberg, who has wiggled his way into Ibsen’s house and announced his plan to bed Ibsen’s wife. All the while, a pregnant Jane (that would be the modern-day Hedda) can be seen sitting on her couch, staring forlornly at a paperback edition of Hedda Gabler.

Carolyn Baeumler with co-actor robots in Heddatron. Photo Joan Marcus. Courtesy Les Freres Corbusier.

Midway through the play, just as Jane is about to blow her brains out, two robots appear. “That’s my robotic heart beating inside my robotron,” the one called Hans says. His partner Billy declares, “I love her. I would melt myself for her.” The robots aren’t mere objects; they’re full-fledged actors, delivering lines and emoting via blinking lights, puffs of smoke and unspooling tickertape. When they capture Jane’s attention, they spirit her off to the rainforest where she can find liberation performing lines from Hedda Gabler.

The robots are the work of Cindy Jeffers, 31, and Meredith Finkelstein, 28, co-founders of the robot arts collective Botmatrix. “The original play all takes place in one living room,” Finkelstein says. “Adding robots makes it more exciting in a culture with blockbusters and crazy plot twists.”

Jeffers and Finklestein both hold day jobs. They devoted a year’s worth of free time to creating Heddatron’s fleet of radio-controlled robots. Billy and Hans, the surrogates for Hedda’s husband and Ejlert Lövborg, stand the tallest and look the most like R2D2, with thick trunks and wimpy arms made of sheet metal. Their four colleagues look less like refugees from a space colony: Aunt Julie is a Victorian silhouette; Berta the maid is a broom on wheels; there is a spidery-looking thing made out of vines; and Judge Brack’s robot is a foam box dressed up with a wig, a cape and unseemly strips of pleather in lieu of a face.

Heddatron’s stage had to be made of plexiglass so the robots could roll around on their wheels. Another constraint was the robots’ need to be recharged for three hours after every four hours of being awake. “We had to schedule our rehearsals around that,” says the play’s producer, Aaron Lemon-Strauss. The greatest challenge fell to the rest of the cast; they had to figure out how to interact with the robots. “The actors were initially scared of them,” Finkelstein says.

In the end, it all came together without a hitch. There’s an ecstatic, operatic quality to the final scene, where Jane and Ibsen perform with the robots. As they spout off a medley of lines from Ibsen’s original play, the robots zip about the stage, occasionally colliding with props or one another (at one performance, Judge Brack reportedly got stuck in the corner of the stage). “Most of the bumping was intentional,” Jeffers says. “It’s meant to speak to their own frailties.”

Heddatron has closed, but the robots seem to be getting on just fine. They now reside in their creators’ Brooklyn studio, and are about to star in a series of film shorts that won’t involve scripts, just “loose situations” that Finkelstein and Jeffers came up with.

A wedding isn’t among them.

Hedda Gabler is playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music until March 26.

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer. She co-wrote The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber. Its sequel, All Q, No A, is due out in June.

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