Hedda Gabler
Yale Repertory Theatre
Through Dec. 20
Marianna Gailus had three ways to bring a Henrik Ibsen line back to life on the Yale Repertory Theatre stage.
Hit the line with sarcasm?
Lead on a would-be suitor?
Summon genuine soul-searching?
Gailus delivers a commanding performance by playing close attention to the possibilities of inconclusive diaoluge as the title character in the currently playing revival of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, portraying a domineering, increasingly hopeless woman trapped by societal restrictions on women in late 19th century Oslo. (She reprises a role Dianne Wiest played at the Rep in 1981.) Gailus helps transport a period-specific piece to modern-day relevance.
Gailus, a 2017 Yale grad, returned to town for the role after Yale Rep Artistic Director James Bundy caught her performance as an understudy earlier this year in an off-Broadway one-person, eight-character show called Vanya. Bundy recruited Gailus to star in the Rep production. It proved a prescient choice.
The line in question comes in response to a remark the character Judge Brack makes to Hedda, a newly married daughter of a deceased general staring at a lifetime of boredom and sequestration.
“You know, you’re not very happy,” Brack, sensing an opening for an extramarital affair, tells her. “Are you, truth be told?”
“I don’t know why I should be. Happy,” Gailus’s Hedda responds. “Perhaps you could tell me.”
In his script, Ibsen inserted that pause — a period or dash — between “be” and “happy.” That hesitation speaks to Hedda’s internal wrangling.
He did a lot of that, Gailus said in an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program: He wrote sometimes vague lines open to interpretation, then added stage directions and punctuation that filled in the gaps.
It’s up to the actors and directors to continue filling those gaps.
“There’s a lot of people stopping themselves speaking halfway through a line. There are a lot of dashes. He did that deliberately,” Gailus observed of Ibsen.
Bundy and the Gabler cast spent lots of time discussing this one scene, from the play’s second act, Gailus said. They spoke of why Hedda could be speaking saracastically, belittling the notion of happiness and the savvy of the questioner. That would fit with the dismissive attitude Hedda displays toward those around her in general.
“‘I don’t know why I should be happy. Perhaps you could tell me, haha, because I’m obviously so miserable, and this is all a joke to me,'” as Gailus put it in the radio interview.
Or Hedda could be responding to the judge’s unarticulated but clearly communicated sexual interest, leading him on to tell her more.
Despite her outward defenses, Hedda is wrestling with rapidly shrinking options and hopes for her life, as Gailus gradually reveals through the four-act play. So the line Ibsen wrote could serve as a moment of introspection, a genuine request for advice.
In the end, Gailus said, she incorporated all three approaches. They represent multiple realities that can co-exist at the same moment.
She also follows her muse: Some nights the balance among those three interpretations shifts based on how her character seems to be operating at the moment, Gailus said.
Capturing the nuances of a line like this one is part of how Gailus succeeds in humanizing a character who, based on the plain text of the script, would be a mere villain.
Gailus, who’s 30 (one year older than Hedda in the play), has seen her career start to take off this year. She played a WNBA star-turned-murder victim in an episode of Law and Order. She had the understudy role off-Broadway that then lead to the starring Yale Rep gig. After a two-week holiday break, she’s off to L.A. to play the title role of poet Sylvia Plath in the world premiere of Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia. Plan to see a lot more of Marianna Gailus, to our collective cultural … happiness.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with actress Marianna Gailus on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
