Puhlic Perspective is the Pittshurgh PublicTheater's newsletter for suhscrihers and friends. lho Is Hedda? Enigmatic ·Role Provides Challenge For Talented Actresses
Helena Ruotl will play Hedda In the Public Theater's new adaptation of Ibsen's classic, April 11-May 14.
Glenda Jackson as Hedda, a landmark interpretation, in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1975 production.
Taking on the title role of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has proved a challenge for many famous actresses ever since its first production in 1891. After all, who was this woman Hedda Gabler? Why does she marry a man she despises? What actually happened between her and her companion, Eilert? Why does she dislike Thea Elvsted? Why does she try to drive Eilert to his death? Answering these questions has produced a variety of interpretations from a multitude of actresses. No two portrayals of Hedda are ever alike, as each actress finds a different key into the heart of this enigmatic woman. In 1898, Elizabeth Robins proved herself an adventurous spirit by being the first actress to appear in a professional American production of Hedda Gabler. At the turn of the century any company producing Ibsen was confronted with staunch resistance and strident objections on the grounds that Ibsen was immoral and possessed of a depraved mind that was only interested in corruption and disease. Actresses faced with this hostility spent a great deal of time defending Ibsen and their portrayals. To avoid controversy these actresses often edited his dialogue in an attempt to make him more palatable. Robins cut all references to Hedda's pregnancy. Minnie Maddern Fiske (stage name - Mrs. Fiske), one of the first to perform and produce Ibsen, deleted the mention of Hedda's pregnancy as well as omitting her conversation with Judge Brack in which she tells him how she got George to propose to her, thus eliminating some of Hedda's manipulativeness. Yet Robins recognized Hedda as a woman of her time: "a bundle of unused possibilities, educated to fear life; too much opportunity to develop her weakness; no opportunity at all to use her best powers." She also praises Ibsen for his acknowledgement of the position of
women in society, for he knew that "a good many women have found it possible to get through life by help of the knowledge that they have the power to end it rather than accept certain slaveries." This last quote is a chilling example of the desperation and powerlessness that many women were stil.I experiencing near the turn of the century. Despite the public's malevolent attitude toward Ibsen, productions of his works continued. Since melodrama was the theatrical staple at the time, a great many Heddas were performed at a hysterical pitch with much posturing. Mrs. Fiske portrayed her as having insatiable curiosity, a quality that eliminated much of Hedda's meanness. Alla Nazimova depicted her as a serpentine vamp. Some of these portrayals had little to do with Ibsen, yet every exploration of Hedda's character revealed her complexity and the genius of Ibsen's writing. It wasn't until the 1920's that theater succeeded in breaking out of the melodramatic mold. Women were also destroying stereotypes, thus opening the Continued on page 2
New Adaptation of Hedda at PPT Obie Award-winning playwright and screenwriter, Corinne Jacker, has been commissioned by the Public to create a new adaptation of this world classic specifically for Pittsburgh's premiere actress, Helena Ruoti, and for Lee Sankowich, the brilliant director of five of the Public's most successful productions. Written in contemporary language, while retaining its 1880's. setting, the play's meaning takes on a fresh and lively quality, unencumbered by awkward period expressions and figures of speech.
Rpril •May 1989
August Wilson's Fences: The Most Honored Play In Broadway History Comes Home "In 1965, when I was 20, I sat all night writing in the Hill district's bars and restaurants until they kicked me out," says August Wilson. "I'd be filling my shorthand pad with poems, drawings, parts of stories, and someone behind the counter would say, 'You got to leave. My breakfast customers are coming.' Then someone else would lay down eight, ten bucks - enough for six breakfasts - so I could keep ori writing.'' The regulars who saved his seat at Eddie's Restaurant, and the B & Mon lower Centre Avenue, are vital connections to Wilson's writing today. His lifelong friends are among those he met while "standing, for 13 years, on the corner of Centre and Kirkpatrick," or at the Halfway Art Gallery_~_n<:l Afro-Americ,an_Institute. "These were the friends who raised me and sanctioned the idea of myself as a worthwhile person_" In 1978, when Wilson began to write plays - Black Bart And The Sacred Hills, Jitney, Fullerton Street- "I was hearing 1 for the first t ime the voices of people I had spent my entire life around." In his first play to reach Broadway, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1984, he was hearing the voices and the music, too, from nights at the Hurricane, the Florentine lounge and Crawford Grill. "I used to listen to Kenny Fisher on sax. And Jake Million-es (former president of the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education, now a City Council candidate). Jake was playing bass then. I haven't put my friends in my plays. But what I wrote about in Ma Rainey- black musicians being exploited by a white recording company - was important information by way of a song_" In 1987, August Wilson's play Fences, which will have its Pittsburgh premiere at the Public Theater on May 23, won the Pulitzer Prize, four Tony Awards, including Best Drama, and virtually every award a playwright can receive. Set in 1950's Pittsburgh, in the backyard of a house on the Hill, Fences centers on a proud, embittered patriarch, Troy Maxson, and his teenage son, Cory. Their immediate conflict is kindled when Cory is recruited to play college football. Troy, once a Homestead Grays baseball star barred from the segregated big leagues, demands that his son turn down the scholarship because he cannot believe times have really changed. Troy Maxson's yams and raps In his backyard ("I hit seven home runs off of Satchel Paige. You can't get no better than that!'i were some of the tales told at Pat's Place, a cigar store and billiards parlor on Wylie Avenue, where Bill "Bojangles" Robinson used to shoot a "good game," and where August Wilson heard stories. Josh Gibson from the North Side (who, like Troy Maxson, was never able to play in the Major Leagues) was a hot item: 800 lifetime home runs for the Homestead Grays - 84 in one season. And there was always talk of Satchel Paige ("He threw
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Pittsburgh's August Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Fences, at the Public May 23-July 2.
nothing but aspirin tablets - fast balls!'i who played for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the sandlot team that Gus Greenlee, the Hill's "numbers" mogul, turned into Negro National League champions in 1935. Greenlee also ran the Crawford Grill, where, in Fences, Troy Maxson's older son, Lyons, sits in with the band. Wilson spent considerable time in Pat's Place, listening to the old men of the community. 'When someone mentioned a friend who had just died, I wanted to know all about him. When every d~y had to be negotiated, I wanted to know how it was that these men had lived so long." "On Centre Avenue, I was learning how to be a man," says Wilson. "If I'm in trouble, I got to know what to do. Like Troy Maxson in Fences, we have to teach kids harsh realities, prepare them to face the world. Black men have always been interested, more interested in parenting than others. I can't tell you how many men are in the pen because they decided 'My kid's gonna have that for Christmas!' There's a great willingness to risk, to die, for that" Since his own father "very rarely came around," August Wilson's "parenting" came from his mother, Daisy, who traveled from North Carolina to Pittsburgh in 1937. "It was a time when people carrying bibles and guitars arrived with their S()ng their only weapon. She settled at 1727 Bedford Avenue in the Hill, and lived and worked and died for her children and grandchildren - for the world she would leave to my daughter." (Sakina Ansari, Wilson's daughter by his first marriage, Is an 18 year old student at Morgan State University in Baltimore.) "My mother taught me how to read, and at five I had my first card from the Wylie Avenue branch of the Carnegie Library. When I was 12, we moved to Hazelwood, where Continued on page 4