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The Wild Duck
If there’s a nagging sense of simulation to Court’s Wild Duck, it’s for good reason. Though it uses a new adaptation by Nelson, it seems Newell’s production is really based on the Romanian director Lucian Pintilie’s version, which played D.C.’s Arena Stage and Minneapolis’s Guthrie in the late 1980s. Newell served as Pintilie’s assistant director on those productions; here, Pintilie gets an “original direction by” credit, and, judging by published accounts of that earlier production, Newell is faithfully re-creating the former work.
In Ibsen’s 1884 play, an overly idealistic man’s obsession with exposing the lies that hold together his friend’s marriage and family brings about needless tragedy. The Wild Duck has been interpreted as a rejection of both the lines-in-the-sand moralism of Ibsen’s earlier work and the strict dramaturgical divide between comedy and tragedy. Newell and Nelson, like Pintilie, heighten those extremes here, but the effect is flattening to the point of melodrama.
Kevin Gudahl paints the breakdown of Ekdal, the man whose blinders are lifted, as an eruption of cartoonish, petulant buffoonery, while Laura Scheinbaum plays his pure-of-heart teenaged daughter with an innocence so exaggerated it borders on mental illness. As for the well-intentioned, messianic Gregers (Jay Whittaker) and the pragmatic Relling (Timothy Edward Kane), this version leaves little room for Ibsen’s ambiguity regarding who’s in the right. Court’s re-creation is satisfying enough as an artifact, but with a director so adept at bringing his own visions to classic texts, we’d prefer brand-new Newell.
