The Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre struggles with Hedda Gabler

As is now a tradition, an evening with Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre is a bit of a soirée. In the drapes-and-concrete METspace (the building that the company has gutted on Main), audience members get treated to desserts and cheeses, music and chatter, charming pre-show speeches from director and party hostess Karen Paisley, and that happy tickle that comes from watching good people haul culture up from nothing.

With some impressive grants and an expanding subscriber base, MET has much to celebrate: cushions on the church-pew seating, investment in grander and grander sets. Lately, MET has even begun to offer one of theater’s purest pleasures, one often forsaken in the catch-as-catch-can world of upstart companies: striking performers parading about in a series of impressive costumes. Throughout the current MET production of Hedda Gabler, Atif Rome’s gowns and waistcoats delight. The drawing-room set is no disappointment, either, with sumptuous divans where man-eater Hedda and an alcoholic historian rhapsodize about the “beauty” of suicide. This is how it feels to be fabulously depressed.

So MET creates celebrations and ennui in a building that, just a couple of years back, was a Christian haunted house. That’s impressive. It also is taking on Ibsen’s trickiest play, in a new translation by Andrew Upton. Less impressive is this Hedda as a whole, but Hedda is such an enigma in a headache to begin with that I can’t get too exercised about what doesn’t work.

Ibsen’s great tragedy is mysterious and upsetting but also off-center, a bleak romance driven not by the characters’ love for each other but their love for their own cynicism. It’s as glum as a Norwegian winter but it crackles with brittle comedy. Hedda herself — played by Katie Gilchrist as a dazzling monster — could, in a sensible world, turn her intelligence to worthwhile work, but in old Norway, she has married a man whom she despises, and she can find nothing better to do with herself than dream of burning the hair of a girl she bullied growing up (in its 118-year-old way, the play manages to address cruelty and “cutting” among the Hot-Topic set). Trapped in a society that values only her beauty, Hedda — like some nightmare of Edith Wharton’s — passes her days wrecking that society.

At least, that’s what I always got from Hedda. In this production, as I tried to work out the why of her awfulness and discover what humanness in her has collapsed, I began to suspect that MET is still working it out, too.

At times, working it out seems a challenge that the company isn’t ready for, because the actors have trouble merely getting Upton’s lines out. In Upton’s adaptation, the characters are continually interrupting each other — a trick that Paisley’s cast hasn’t mastered. A character will say something like “That’s right, but — ” only to be cut off by someone else, but again and again the rhythms are off. We hear the dash, and a fumbling pause, and only then, when it’s clear that the actor is waiting to be interrupted, does the interruption come.

As Hedda, Gilchrist sorts through the contradictions: She’s bright but stunted, brute but sensual, beautiful but dying inside. It’s another strong performance from an actress who has been enjoying a remarkable run of them. Unfortunately, she’s sometimes stranded up there, especially in her early scenes with Matt Rapport, who plays her clueless, bookworm husband, Jorgen, so broadly that you’d think he was acting on a parade float. Rapport is funny, but the effort shows — no man who takes himself as seriously as Jorgen does would time his humiliations so exquisitely. The result goes beyond the estrangement between husband and wife that Ibsen suggests. It instead shows a lack of connection between actor and actress.

Later, Richard Stubblefield zones in and out as Lovborg, that alcoholic historian attracted to Hedda. A gaunt, haunted fellow, his Lovborg comes to intense life when sparring with Hedda, but he’s unconvincing when he takes up drinking again. He simply doesn’t seem to hurt enough.

Of the men, only John Robert Paisley, playing Judge Brack, consistently seems to be in the same scene Hedda is in. Paisley’s performances have been highlights in any number of MET shows, and this is no exception. With cool, cruel insight, his Brack studies Hedda for any moment of weakness. When he pounces, Paisley gives the crowd a wicked jolt.

Christina Shafer Martin is raw and effective as Lovborg’s young mistress, especially when her eyes dampen as Hedda bullies her. I can’t bring myself to mention the other performances beyond pointing out that the indecipherable squeaking in the first scene had me seriously thinking of making for the exit.

MET has done stronger work. For all her ambition, director Paisley has come up with a tour guide of a show, one that introduces a great work and ushers you around the main building but doesn’t have a key to its heart. That’s not to say that the show is a washout. The production tries your patience, but how often does high-quality theater around here dare such material? As the show unfolded, as Gilchrist took over and as Ibsen’s tale hitched its psychoanalytical mysteries to exciting dramatic action, I was often caught up in it. Then, when I wasn’t, I could at least look forward to the cookies at intermission.

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