EgoPo does Ibsen’s ‘Lady From the Sea’

Ellida was unsettled even ten years previously when she encountered a mysterious stranger. After he sailed away, she agreed to a marriage of reason with Dr. Wangel, a decent if somewhat stolid man who already had two children from his late wife. The burdens of being a stepmother and of being out of her element in this mountainous part of Norway have now rendered her even more restless and perhaps mentally unbalanced.

Ellida is called the Lady from the Sea, as if she were a creature that lived there. This phantasmagoric element conflicts with the realism we normally expect from Ibsen. In effect, he asks us to question whether humankind is meant to exist on dry land. The hypnotic power that Ellida discerns in the sea begins to intrigue us. Ibsen even dangles the possibility that Ellida gave birth to a baby that resembled the stranger several years after she last saw him.

Helpless to resist

Ellida doesn’t understand her deep yearnings, which are linked somehow to the physical surroundings of her former home on an island where her father kept a lighthouse. Now she lives on a fjord surrounded by steep mountains and feels hemmed in.

This feeling manifests itself in Ellida’s frigidity toward her husband. She craves an escape from dependence on him, even an escape from the marriage itself. And so she turns the routines of housekeeping and child rearing over to others.

Ellida is far from my favorite Ibsen woman: She seems unable to affirm her own will, and she’s helpless to resist the importuning of a strange man from ten years past, whom she barely knew then. She “promised herself” to this sailor long ago? Come on Ellida, you want to shout. Assert yourself!

While I had mixed feelings about the supernatural elements and about Ellida, I couldn’t help but be charmed by the doctor’s children — the precocious Bolette and her impulsive younger sister, Hilde (Lee Minora). K.O. DelMarcelle as Bolette came close to stealing EgoPo’s recent production, not because Genevieve Perrier as Ellida is a deficient actress but because Ellida’s character is so weird and Bolette is relatively normal.

Hunky sailor

The two principal male roles were superbly played by Ed Swidey as the long-suffering Dr. Wangel and Ross Beschler as a teacher who is a family friend with his own set of confusions who, we intuit, is romantically interested in Ellida. Kevin Chick is callow as a sickly sculptor who makes an ineffective proposal to Wangel’s elder daughter. Robert Carlton looks hunky as the sailor from Ellida’s past who reappears and demands that Ellida leave her husband and go off with him.

Dan Soule designed a set that created an impressionistic atmosphere within the big stage area. I wish it also had depicted the claustrophobic mountains that agitated Ellida.

It was refreshing to see this out-of-the-ordinary drama by a major playwright. Once again, EgoPo performed a valuable service by bringing something different to a Philadelphia stage.