Lantern's 'Lady From the Sea'

A Doll’s House wasn’t the playwright’s last word on bourgeois marriage after all.

ROBERT ZALLER

Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888), given its belated Philadelphia premiere in October at the Lantern Theater, has never been popular, and it’s easy to see why. The setting is familiar: a small-town, bourgeois household hemmed in by the Norwegian fjords; a doting and asphyxiating husband; and a younger, restless wife tempted by a wild freedom. A Doll’s House redux, in short— except that, unlike Nora Helmer, the heroine who walks out the door to inaugurate the modern theater and modern feminism, Ellida Wangel chooses comfort, domesticity, surrogate motherhood and the superannuated embraces of her lawful spouse. She does so, moreover, just at the moment when her former lover appears to claim her, and when she has wrung from her husband permission to run off with him for good.

It seems as awkward a volte-face as any Hollywood ending, leaving the play’s characters no less nonplussed than some members of the audience appeared to be. It is awkward as well for feminist critics, who, embarrassed by Ibsen’s apparent backsliding, have been as reluctant to touch the play as most producers.
Lantern Theater’s recent production owes its life to a collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s current exhibition of Edvard Munch’s The Mermaid. Munch’s mural, based on familiar legend, is one of his more provocative evocations of the archetypal feminine. But there is a lesser-known counterpart to the mermaid in Scandinavian lore, the havmand or merman, a creature who, unable to mate with his own kind, is forced to reproduce by seducing human females-- a demon lover whose seed is both life and death. The mysterious Stranger who bewitches Ellida— a sailor who, by credible rumor, has murdered a former captain (rebellion against the social order, overthrow of the patriarchal male)— is obviously meant to evoke the havmand.

Ellida believes that the child she has conceived with Wangel is actually the Stranger’s, sprung to belated life but condemned to an early death. Terrified of a repeat performance (but still secretly drawn to the Stranger himself), she has refused all sexual relations with the hapless Wangel ever since.

The plot is complicated by the presence of Wangel’s two daughters by a previous marriage: the nubile but passive Bolette, whose former tutor, Arnholm, returns to seek her hand, and the younger but precocious Hilde, who becomes the object of attention for Lyngstrand, a tubercular, would-be artist who is simultaneously one of the most pathetic and most repellent characters in the Ibsen canon. These stories entwine with the major one, providing both enrichment and ironic counterpoint. Arnholm, a rejected former suitor of Ellida herself, seeks polite revenge by transferring his affections to her stepdaughter, while Lyngstrand, after asking Bolette to remain devoted to him while he goes south to seek his health and fortune, suggests to Hilde that she will reap the bounty of his affections in the end because Bolette herself will be too old when he returns. (Creepy, yes.)

The Stranger’s return precipitates the play’s crisis. Ellida effectively finishes off Wangel by telling him she has never cared for him, and she demands that he give her her “freedom” to choose the Stranger, without telling him whether she will actually exercise it. Wangel is in a position to refuse, for he is aware of the Stranger’s crime and threatens to turn him in to the police. Broken by Ellida’s contempt, however, he agrees to release her from her vows, but only after the Stranger has returned to his ship. Ellida rejects this compromise, insisting that her only meaningful freedom exists in the present moment of choice. Wangel reluctantly yields his last card, upon which Ellida astonishes him and everyone else by violently rejecting the Stranger, and promising her hapless husband connubial bliss and her hitherto rejected stepdaughters maternal devotion.

For Bolette, the gesture comes too late, for she has lovelessly succumbed to Arnholm’s proposal as her only chance to escape a stifling spinsterhood. Thus, the circle of female domestic and sexual servitude is reinstated just as Ellida is breaking it. If Ellida’s rebellion is at least arguably an attempt to adjust bourgeois marriage to a union of equals (though she would seem to have acquired the whip hand as thoroughly as any Strindberg heroine--Miss Julie is an almost exactly contemporary work), Bolette’s surrender seems thoroughly retrograde, an acknowledgment of the hopeless terms of female subjection.

Part of the tension in The Lady from the Sea comes from its unresolved combination of realistic and symbolic elements. The Stranger obviously represents the lure of sexual freedom, but life as a seaman’s whore (the practical reality) is hardly a credible alternative to Wangel’s household. Ellida has no real choice, as the play’s denouement reveals, and the Stranger’s sinister mythic resonance suggests the pitfalls of a liberated sexuality. It might thus be concluded that both Ellida and Bolette succumb to the realities of patriarchal dominion in the end.

It’s equally arguable, however, that they have succeeded in renegotiating the terms of bourgeois matrimony to their advantage. Ellida brings Wangel to heel, and Bolette compels Arnholm to make so many concessions that she might be seen as a Nora in the making. Ibsen is a dramatist of genius, after all, and the essence of genius on the stage is that, while characters must make final choices, the playwright does not. In the longer view, Ibsen suits no one’s ideology. With Strindberg and Bergman, his Swedish successors, he is the master anatomist of that modern installment of the battle of the sexes, bourgeois marriage. As Bergman’s recent Saraband reminds us, it is a battle still under way.

Kathryn C. Nocero’s able but unintrusive direction lets the play speak for itself, the best interpretative choice. The ensemble cast, led by Susan McKey and the always estimable Tim Moyer as the principals, do a fine job, and Jered McLenigan’s Lyngstrand is a small gem. Nick Embree’s set, with a flooring that suggests both land and sea--the shifting purchase of bourgeois marriage itself--is a subtle complement to the action, and Millie Hiibel’s period costumes are spot-on. The Lantern’s home at St. Stephen’s Theater (Tenth and Ludlow) is not a large theater, but it is a welcoming space, and its company knows how to use it expressively. The Lady and the Sea has waited a long time for Philadelphia, but it has been well served.

Robert Zaller is a history professor at Drexel University, a playwright and poet, and a critic whose contributions have appeared in the Inquirer, Seven Arts, Welcomat, Philadelphia Forum and Schuylkill Valley Journal.