Review: In The Wild Duck, the Truth Doesn't Set Anyone Free

As in An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen’s 1884 drama The Wild Duck revolves around a truth-teller. But though the earlier play’s Dr. Thomas Stockmann was pilloried for the dark truths he insisted on publicizing, the righteousness of his mission was never really questioned. In The Wild Duck, however, one character’s belief in absolute honesty has tragic consequences. It’s good to have this rarely produced Ibsen play back onstage, especially in a fine new coproduction from Theatre for a New Audience and the Washington, D.C.-based Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Gregers Werle (Alexander Hurt) is the truth-teller in The Wild Duck. He’s the son of merchant Håkon Werle (Robert Stanton), but his return to the family after years of self-imposed exile is hardly a happy one. Still bitter about his father’s corrupt misdeeds toward his late mother and others, Gregers rebuffs his invitation into the family business. Instead, he finds a new mission in life, inspired by reacquaintance with childhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal (Nick Westrate). He plans to rid Hjalmar of his illusions about his marriage to former family maid Gina (Melanie Field), allowing them to start afresh, he believes, on a firmer foundation of transparency.

Though Gregers is the catalyst for the play’s events, Hjalmar is its main character, with most of the action set in the studio he shares with Gina, daughter Hedvig (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), and father Old Ekdal (David Patrick Kelly). Though he makes a living as a photographer, Hjalmar spends his free time working on an unspecified invention that he believes will not only help his daughter, but also rehabilitate the Ekdal name after a legal skirmish sent his father to jail for many years. What Gregers knows that Hjalmar doesn’t is that Gina once carried on an affair with Håkon.

The play’s title refers to a duck Håkon wounded but which his dog rescued and the Ekdals nursed back to health. In context, the mallard becomes a symbol of what their neighbor Relling (Matthew Saldívar) calls “life-lies,” especially since it’s locked up with other animals in a loft in which Old Ekdal occasionally goes hunting, therefore continuing the illusion that he is still able to be a hunter.

In the David Eldridge translation used by director Simon Godwin, Relling diagnoses Gregers’s single-minded belief in the “claim of the ideal” as a case of “chronic righteousness.” That latter phrasing feels especially pointed here in the U.S. during this politically divisive moment of ours, with both sides often guilty of declaring the correctness of their positions while ignoring gray areas in between.

Eldridge slightly undercuts its hard look at such nuances, though, with the way he gives Gina a tougher edge than in Ibsen’s original. Here, Eldridge has Gina not only describe Gregers as “a spiteful and unkind child” who “remains the same as a man,” but also outright warns Hedvig to stay away from him. Such interpolations threaten to turn Gregers into more of a villain than Ibsen perhaps intended, an indulgence in the kind of self-righteousness the play ostensibly critiques.

That blot aside, Godwin generally gets the balance between naturalism and symbolism just right. Andrew Boyce’s scenic design encapsulates both tones, realistic in its particulars, but with a bit of the stage jutting out in the foreground stage left to visually suggest a moral universe slightly askew. A stark quality pervades Darron L West’s sound design, especially with performer Alexander Sovronsky offering ominous solo viola music in between acts. The choice by Satellite Wigs to have Gregers don a crew cut, giving the character an uncomfortably militant air, is especially striking.

The overall excellent cast makes The Wild Duck as emotionally involving as it is intellectually intriguing. Field brings both maternal warmth and no-nonsense sensibility to Gina, while Westrate suggests Hjalmar’s naïveté without shortchanging his sincerity. Hurt more successfully evokes Gregers’s bratty side than his well-meaning side, but that may be more a directorial choice than Hurt’s fault.

Most impressive of all is Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, heartbreakingly convincing as a teen ultimately torn apart by the adults’ mixed messages. She brings genuine heft to Ibsen’s still-provocative assertion that in some cases, maybe it’s worth maintaining some lies in order to make life bearable.