Quintessence Theatre Group presents Henrik Ibsen's 'The Wild Duck'

Like Julius Caesar, which shares the Sedgwick Theater stage on alternating nights, The Wild Duck addresses the naïveté and underlying danger of noblesse oblige. Shakespeare explores the topic on a grand political level, while Ibsen focuses instead on interpersonal relationships. Taken together, both plays show how good intentions, foisted upon a friend or a country, can pave the garden path to hell.

Savior complex

Ibsen communicates his message through Gregers Werle (Tom Carman), a dreamy-eyed son of privilege who has devoted his youth to “the claim of the ideal.” He returns reluctantly to the home of his wealthy father (an appropriately brusque Michael Brusasco), disgusted by what he deems to be the old man’s moral failings. He decides to do a good deed for his friend Hjalmar Ekdal (David Pica), a kindhearted photographer from a lower social station.

Hjalmar has married Gina (Brett Ashley Robinson), a former servant in the Werle household; they live with their 12-year-old daughter, Hedwig (Deysha Nelson, an astonishingly assured child actor), and Hjalmar’s father (Paul Hebron), a disgraced former military officer. The titular fowl roams the garret above their flat — presented here as an overgrown enclosed patio — ready and waiting to be hunted.

Most of the play happens in the Ekdal apartment. Em Arrick’s lived-in set, warmly lit by Maria Shaplin, creates a homey, middle-class environment that stands in sharp contrast to the austere Werle estate shown in the first scene. When Gregers moves into a spare room the Ekdals must rent out — much to Gina’s dismay — he brings disharmony with him.

Ideals vs. lies

The Wild Duck has been called a comedy, but Quintessence smartly foregrounds the underlying tension pervading the central friendship and the damage it does to Hjalmar and Gina’s marriage. Carman presents Gregers as a seductive lord of misrule; his true-believer rhetoric appeals to Hjalmar, even as Gina quickly sniffs him out as a fraud. Doctor Relling, a family friend played with clear-eyed conviction by Mary Tuomanen, doesn’t mince words either: “Don’t use that foreign word: ideals. We have an excellent native word: lies.”

Gregers’s moral rectitude calls to mind our current obsession with ideological purity — no doubt he would have been “Bernie or bust” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Pica’s gullible Hjalmar makes an easy mark, willing to be convinced that his seemingly happy life with Gina and Hedwig has been an illusion. Hebron’s broken, muttering Old Ekdal, ground into servitude by his powerful overlords under potentially questionable circumstances, could even serve as an avatar for the fragility of the white working class.

Wright also makes connections to the ongoing international conversation around sexual assault through Gina, who was raped by Werle père while under his employment. “He wouldn’t leave me alone until he got his way,” she tells her unsympathetic husband, who regards her as the guilty party. Although her fidelity is questioned, Robinson plays Gina with a spine of steel; even as Hjalmar’s rebuke pains her, she knows that truth will out.

And it does, but tragically so. The play’s haunting climax reminds everyone — characters and audience — that blind certitude is not a virtue. Hjalmar’s photographs may exist in black and white, but life is lived in shades of grey.