Word: duck
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There is a storeroom which he has converted into a small forest with a few pine trees and some rabbits, where he can relive his days as a great hunter and sportsman. Never has an unseen room been so important to a play, for here also resides the wild duck, shot in the wing and brought up from "the depths of the sea," now tenderly cared for by Hedvig, Hjalmer's 14-year-old daughter. The wild duck (which also remains unseen) becomes the central symbol of the play--for Hedvig, for Hjalmer, and for the Ekdal family...
...Wild Duck is something of an anomaly among Ibsen's dramas. Those who have seen or read such signature pieces as A Doll House or An Enemy of the People will find the most memorable features of those earlier works either absent or grotesquely parodied in this odd, often confounding, yet strangely moving tragicomedy. Mingling, even juxtaposing, humor and pathos, undercutting the concept of the heroic ideal with lacerating irony, and completely devoid of the compelling central figure so key to the other plays, it is also arguably the trickiest one to interpret and perform. The current American Repertory Theater...
...father reveals a man deeply resentful of his father's betrayal of his mother, and perhaps also of the force of simple virility that he himself lacks. Stephen Rowe throws a downright spooky cast on to the character's obsession with Hjalmer and the Ekdal family--and the wild duck, its most obvious metaphor. Even down-to-earth, matter-of-fact Gina Ekdal, somewhat heavily played by Karen MacDonald, shows signs of guilt and unease about her past, despite her assertions to the contrary. Hedvig, with her luminous innocence and child's intuition, is the one truly pure and simple...
...while the guests are playing (symbolically?) Blindman's Buff; or the moment when the lighting in the Ekdal apartment gradually alters to create an image of a deep pine forest against the backdrop walls. And again, just as powerful is the suggestion of what is not seen--the wild duck, who at intervals is heard faintly quacking, and the room in which she nests...
...almost too effectively--by Jack Willis, who cuts a Jack Nicholson-like figure with his sardonic drawl and menacing animus towards Gregers. His is the image that lasts, the voice that crowds out the others and cuts down even the moments of pathos, especially at the end. The Wild Duck may not be a tragedy, but there is a tragedy within it, which fails somehow to emerge from the layers of irony and disillusionment...