The Lady From the Sea
ShawChicago
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Seldom produced, it’s perhaps the only Ibsen play that can be characterized as a comedy, complete with happy ending. But it’s comedy of the Chekhovian sort, focused on trapped and unfulfilled characters. A group of people gathered at Dr. Wangel’s remote estate discover that cupid’s arrows have pierced all the wrong targets. Wangel is concerned about his high-strung wife, Ellida, and invites an old family friend, Dr. Arnholm, for a visit. Arnholm misunderstands the nature of his friend’s request and believes that Wangel’s teenage daughter Bolette–once Arnholm’s student–pines for him. But Bolette has no thoughts of romance with her slightly balding former tutor: she’s planning an escape from her backwater town. Still, she’s got eyes–sort of–for Hans, a consumptive young man who drapes himself over the furniture and calls himself an artist. Hans has eyes for anyone in a skirt–Ellida, Bolette, her younger sister Hilda–but is most taken with the idea of being adored.
Despite all the symbolic sea imagery and Ellida’s mystical romance with a kind of sea demon, Ibsen was determined to rebel against the melodrama that dominated the theater of his day, as he’d been doing for more than ten years. A character so seduced by the ocean that she can hardly breathe when away from it may seem fanciful, but to Ibsen–who claimed to be a realist–she was representative of the national character. “People in Norway are spiritually under the domination of the sea,” he wrote to a friend. “I do not believe other people can fully understand it.” Ellida’s story is also a retooled version of Ibsen’s mother’s. As a young woman, she fled her native Denmark to escape an Icelandic poet whom she called “a wild, strange, elemental creature” with a “monstrous and demonic will.” She eventually married a widowed preacher 17 years her senior but wrote in later years that she had lived her life “oppressed by a feeling of want and longing.”
Still, you’re unlikely to see a more satisfying production of Ibsen–or, more accurately, semi-Ibsen. Greasy Joan’s staging avoids the cold, polemical feel of the great Norwegian curmudgeon, instead exuding the warmth and liveliness of honest human portrayals.
