Word: lovborg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...whole mood of the play tends to center around the mercurial temperament of Hedda. This leaves the rest of the cast at her violent mercy. The pathetically weak Thea Elvstead (Susan Levine), who has become the new love interest of Hedda's old flame Eilert Lovborg (Josh Frost), becomes one of the key victims of her wrath. In a revealing scene between the two, Hedda curls Thea's mousy locks around her fingers and snarls: "Maybe I will burn off your hair...
Without Hedda on stage, these characters seem to sink into ridiculousness. The passionate pleas of Frost's lovelorn Lovborg seem almost schoolboyish. Judge Brack, played by Nestor Davidson, fares little better. As the insidiously corrupt Brack, Davidson plays up his character with a tad too much joviality. His tendency to toss lines off with Wildean abandon serves only to mar the gravity of his character...
...play comes closer to achieving dramatic balance with the arrival of Eric Jacobson as the equally pivotal character Eilert Lovborg--the pawn to contrast with Brack and Hedda's manipulations, the hidden genius whose character weaknesses lock him into the same dead-ended bitterness as the rest...
Jacobson as Lovborg is not only convincing but heartrending, with a meek bearing masking an inner, doomed nobility of character. What keeps him and Brack from salvaging the play is the same lack of ambition that hampers the other actors. This time, though, the lack comes in the production staff itself. High-schoolish, thrown-together props repeatedly puncture the illusion, starting with the opening complaint of a maiden aunt (Barbara Nathan). "There's no more space here for these flowers," she laments, looking around at the polished, unoccupied tabletops of the Quincy JCR. "So many people have sent flowers already...