Ithaca College

On Thursday, February 19th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery, On the Verge will present a staged reading of HEDDA GABLER, directed by Claire Gleitman (department of English). The cast will include Ithaca College faculty members (Chris Holmes, English; Judy Levitt; Theatre Arts); students (Maggie Thompson, Madeleine Stengel, Dara Pohl Feldman); and local professional actors (Craig MacDonald and Jacob White).

The title character in Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play has inspired more disagreement among critics than almost any other female character in the modern drama. Described by some as “a horrid miscarriage of the imagination, a monster in female form,” she is regarded by others as deeply sympathetic because of her frantic “rebellion against the conventional turn-of-the-century view of woman's place.” Once upon a time the flamboyantly transgressive daughter of the fabled General Gabler, Hedda finds herself at age 29 encased within an oppressively bourgeois existence, married to a stunningly dull man, and pregnant. Within those confines, she attempts to carve out some excitement and, if possible, freedom for herself—with miserable results. Written 11 years after the revolutionary play, A DOLL'S HOUSE, HEDDA GABLER shows us Ibsen in a far more pessimistic mood, as he ponders whether it is possible for any human being to free him or herself from the stifling and patriarchal conventions of middle-class, Victorian society.