According to Judith Thurman's profile in this magazine, Reza completed “Art” in six weeks because she writes “improvising as she goes along, without thinking too much.” Sometimes it's obvious. The spectacle becomes repetitive and we have time to come to the conclusion that if this were a real situation, someone would surely have left such a tedious battle royale. To keep the melee going, Reza must constantly throw her characters at each other, like a cockfighter pushing his birds back into the ring. Harris and Cannavale are flatter and less confident here than I've ever seen. Only Corden, whose last New York stage appearance was in Richard Bean's hyperkinetic commedia dell'arte adaptation One Man, Two Guvnors, has the clowning chops to pull off what is essentially a farce. At one point, Ivan decides he should leave, but he's not quite sure if he will, and Corden makes him hilariously hesitant to spin around, as if Ivan was stuck in an invisible revolving door.
In 1994, Reza built on the idea that there is no innate, pre-social self that truly “loves” an object. She wrote in an intellectual atmosphere heavily influenced by the literary critic René Girard, who proposed a theory of mimetic desire. “Man is a being who does not know what to desire and turns to others to make a decision,” Girard observed. However, she might as well be composing “Art” today, staring at her blank page under the harsh light of the internet panopticon. On the Internet, you constantly hear echoes of Mark's suspicion that opinion is just another currency for status. To like or not to like? Perhaps you can say that I didn't really like “Art”, but I was intrigued by at least the feeling that Reza and her sharp performance didn't give a damn.
Roll the clock back about a hundred years and you find the ne plus ultra of using theater as a boxing ring: Henrik Ibsen, the father of theatrical realism and the play of ideas, who pitted opposing paradigms against each other in his dramas to see which would win. In A Doll's House, he contrasted a woman's duty to her family with the needs of her uncontrollable spirit; in An Enemy of the People he contrasted the doctor's duty to public health with the economic comfort of society. In these two famous plays, Ibsen prioritized the individual over society, and so we consider him the creator of truthful, uncompromising heroes who shattered the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century Norway.
But Ibsen never settled on one thesis. In The Wild Duck of 1884, he turned a truthful and uncompromising character into the monster of the play. That monster is Gregers Wehrle (Alexander Hurt), who returns to his hometown to discover that his childhood friend Hjalmar Ekdahl (the brilliant comedian Nick Westrate) is living in a fool's paradise. Hjalmar's wife, Gina (Melanie Field), has long hidden her past affairs with Werle's wealthy father, Haakon (Robert Stanton), the revelation of which could destroy their marriage. Their adored fourteen-year-old daughter Hedwig (Maaike Laanstra-Korn) believes her slacker father is a great inventor, but this is also a comforting lie. Here Ibsen paints one of his most beautiful (and strange) portraits of a delusional but deeply loving family. In their apartment room, Hjalmar, his father (David Patrick Kelly) and Hedvig have built a ramshackle, dark version of the northern forest for a wild duck with a damaged wing. This hidden Eden satisfies them all – at least until the fanatic Gregers slips in, intent on exposing Hjalmar's illusions.
The play, directed by Simon Godwin from David Eldridge's version, takes a while to find itself, perhaps because Ibsen turns exposition into an unbearably clunky first scene, or because the play goes nearly half an hour without its heart, Hedwig, appearing. The child, of course, will be the one to pay for Gregers' truth, as he destroys the foundation of her parents' relationship. The amazing Laanstra-Korn doesn't play Hedwig simply as an innocent; there is something as dangerous and emotionally unstable in her shocked face as in Gregers' explosive outbursts. However, only the audience seems to be able to see how the adult toxicity builds up in her mind and how – since she won't hate her father – she begins to hate herself.
Theaters don't perform The Wild Duck as often as, say, A Doll's House, maybe because it's terribly, terribly sad. However, for me this is the most honest of Ibsen's plays. Here the great theatrical defender of wisdom through argument recognizes that argument itself has insidious consequences. According to Ibsen, the essence of the debate can easily be misunderstood by young people, especially those who turn their violence on themselves. ♦
