By Samuel L. Leiter
September 14, 2025: Revivals of Henrik Ibsen are common enough, though A Doll’s House tends to dominate. Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People appear regularly, but The Wild Duck (1885), despite its critical standing, is rarer. This Theatre for a New Audience revival at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center is only the third in New York since the 1960s (the second, in 1984, was at BAM’s Opera House a block away).
Its 1918 New York premiere starred 39 year old Alla Nazimova as a nearly 15 year old Hedvig, at a time when Ibsen was revered in Europe but barely produced here. Aside from Minnie Maddern Fiske’s monthlong revivals at the turn of the 20th century, which were the closest he came to commercial recognition, the 10 Ibsen plays done in New York before 1910 rarely ran for more one or two special performances.
British director Simon Godwin’s (Timon of Athens)new staging, in David Eldridge’s version, exposes the play’s creaky structure. (It will run at Godwin’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., after Brooklyn). Gregers Werle (Alexander Hurt) returns home after years away, determined to expose uncomfortable truths about the past of his wealthy father, Hakon Werle (Robert Stanton). Reconnecting with his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal (Nick Westrate), Gregers, fanatically devoted to the “ideal” of truth in human relations, discovers the family’s fragile happiness: Hjalmar’s wife, Gina (Melanie Field), once worked for Werle, and their beloved daughter Hedvig (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) is slowly losing her sight.
In the Ekdals’ attic lives a wounded wild duck, rescued after one of Werle’s hunting trips — a potent symbol of retreat into comforting illusions. Gregers, convinced that honesty will set Hjalmar free, pushes for full disclosure, which reveals that Hedvig was likely Hakon’s, not Hjalmar’s, daughter. Gregers’s zealous righteousness shatters the family’s delicate balance, leading to Hedvig’s suicide and the realization that truth may not always be the noblest path. We all need our pipe dreams, Ibsen (and, later, O’Neill) might be saying.
While the play’s ideational framework remains strong and pertinent, the performances fail to communicate Ibsen’s intentions in a deeply affecting way; instead, we’re alienated by their exaggerations. Hurt’s Gregers, dressed in funereal black, is a charmless zealot; Westrate’s Hjalmar is an infantile egotist, who carries on about inventing something he can’t even describe. Watching two such annoyingly clueless characters for two and a quarter hours is a consummation not to be wished.
Nor does Laanstra-Corn succeed in pushing Hedvig’s teen angst and ultimate hysteria into convincing territory. Only Melanie Field’s grounded Gina and Matthew Saldívar’s wise Dr. Relling, who opposes Gregers by insisting we each need a “life-lie” to survive, offer some relief, though Saldívar’s Relling lacks the needed stature, and his closing imprecation has less bite than it deserves. Overwrought emotional eruptions, especially in Act Two, tip the drama into melodrama, and point up the contrivances, while Eldridge’s translated language sounds like translated, not natural, language. While The Wild Duck is known to contain humorous moments, those that draw laughs in this production occasionally feel like unintended consequences of awkward-sounding lines.
Andrew Boyce’s realistic set, Stacey Derosier’s atmospheric lighting, and Heather C. Freedman’s period costumes—especially a notably embellished ensemble worn by Hakon’s gregarious woman friend, Mrs. Sorby (Mahira Kakkar)—are appropriate. The result, however, remains an uninspired revival that leaves one wondering just how flightworthy The Wild Duck’s wings still are.
The Wild Duck **1/2
Polonsky Shakespeare Center/Theatre for a New Audience 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY.
Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes. tfana.org
September 11– 28, 2025
Photography: Gerry Goodstein, Hollis King
