Review: The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler by Jeff Whitty has an abundance of clever and not much of depth or heart. Director David M. Long does a bang-up job of making it a whizzing entertainment, having recruited three gifted Equity professionals to work with the six St. Ed's Equity-candidate actors relegated to secondary roles.
Playwright Whitty starts with an intriguing hypothetical: what happens to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler after she so famously commits suicide in the last scene of the 1890 play of the same name? We watch Hedda awake in an afterlife, confused, looking around to decipher the only partly familiar world around her. She rises from the 19th-century sofa and discovers that her pillow is drenched with blood but she is apparently unharmed. Then her worst nightmare appears: her husband George Tesman, pained and concerned for her. Won't that man ever go away? Not even beyond the grave?
Whitty gives us a literary limbo, populated with an arbitrary assortment of fictional characters embraced by the popular imagination. Hedda learns that she has been committing suicide over and over again for more that a century. She and others in this limbo survive, deathless and ever the same -- until the moment in which they disappear from living memory.
There's lots of amusing incident along the way, including the disguises, appearances and antics of adorably tiny and manic Sophia Franzella. Whitty's characters appear to struggle with the question of free will, as Hedda and later Mammy proclaim their desire to change so as to avoid the endless repetition of destiny and embrace oblivion. But it's no dilemma -- it's in fact a lemma, the logical proposition setting the parameters for the play ("Hedda lives after her death because she lives in our imaginations").
Jill Blackwood gives Hedda a comic intensity. Johnny Joe Trillayues and Tyler Mount as the sixties flamers are amusing but not very original -- with them Whitty seems to be parodying parodies. David Stokey as the apprehensive Tesman has an admirable manly gentleness and though he has little to do, he is in fact the most appealing character in the piece.
The performance that dominates here, however, is that of Jarrett King, the stocky African American male actor who graduated from St. Ed's in 2009. He doubtless was one of the reasons that his former teacher, director David Long, chose to do this play.
I suspect that you'll see Jarret King on the short list of featured actors in comedies to be considered for Austin's 2011-2012 B. Iden Payne stage awards. Mammy's role is not really a complicated one, but it captures American social change over the last century, encompassing a warm familiar stereotype so beloved before mid-century and now so reviled. King as Mammy gets a couple of dismissive lectures from Lindsley Howard playing slim, elegant cool-mouthed modern African-American women; Mammy's consciousness begins to awaken.
A moment arrives when the cast swirls about that turbaned, aproned, shuffling ol' woman and in a flurry of flying clothing transforms her into a semblance of Bessie Smith. That moment would have been perfect if King had had the singing voice to match it; however, his was a chant of liberation rather than a hot mama blues. He gives both versions his all, and it's an unforgettable performance.
An overlooked irony in King's star turn is the fact that the image of Mammy he burlesques was created by the very real life actress Hattie McDaniel, winner of a 1939 Oscar for that role. In addition to her very successful film career, one that evolved beyond stereotypical Negro roles of the period to more complex characterizations and included much applauded musical performances, in 1945 McDaniel was an organizer and participant in a lawsuit that prompted a Federal judge to declare invalid restrictive housing covenants barring blacks from residing in her upscale Hollywood neighborhood.
McDaniel has two stars on the sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard, one for radio and one for films. Her annual party in Hollywood was a celebrated event, one that Clark Gable never missed. She died in 1952 of breast cancer, aged only 57. American actress Mo'Nique, Oscar winner in 2009, told The Hollywood Reporter in November of that year that she had the rights to McDaniel's life story and intended "to tell that woman's story."
Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 Seeing Things blog, October 4
Review by Adam Roberts for the Austin Chronicle, October 6
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, October 9
Feature by Joe Arellano for Hilltop Views, October 11
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The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler
by Jeff Whitty
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
