The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Jeff Whitty’s comedy takes place in a sort of parallel dimension where all the world’s fictional characters live. Ibsen’s unhappy heroine Hedda Gabler resides on The Cul-de-sac of the Tragic Women with her ineffectual husband, Tesman, and their servant, Mammy; Medea and Tosca live next door. Inevitably, they fall back into their old habits: Hedda shoots herself in the head, Medea kills her kids, and Mammy just rolls her eyes and cleans up after everyone. Yet they keep waking up and doing it all over again—until she decides it’s time for a change.

Conceptually, it lands somewhere between Groundhog Day and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Whitty has about an hour’s worth of solid laughs, witty metaphors and clever juxtapositions. The trouble is he’s spread them over a two-hour script. The playwright takes far too long to establish the rules of his world. Consider how effectively Whitty’s best-known work, Avenue Q (written with Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez), sets up its own high concept within a single introductory song; Adventures takes half an hour to do the same.

Thankfully, De Mayo and Stermer’s charmingly chaotic approach mostly papers over the slow bits; it’s on the order of a Factory Theater show with literary pretensions. When Whitty is most on-the-money, the directors and their game cast follow (they really nail the Jesus gag, pun intended). But it’s Nick Leininger and Matthew Sherbach who get to enact Whitty’s most inspired notion: They play refugees from pre-Stonewall gay theater à la The Boys in the Band. Cattily, self-loathingly bonding with Mammy over their status as dated undesirables, these two actors steal a show that’s built from stolen parts.