Two Women, Three Guns: About Hedda Gabler and Anna Christie

During a week in December when violence seemed to occur in every home, I watched two dramas about women risking their own lives: Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, and Anna Christie at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The plays were written thirty years apart. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in 1891, and Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill in 1921. That year, Alexander Woollcott, reviewed the first production Anna Christie For New York Timeswrote, “All adult visitors must write their names in their notebooks Anna Christie like a drama they really have to watch.” Even though O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christiethe play is rarely performed. The film is currently directed by Thomas Kail, and Anna is played by his wife, Michelle Williams. On the other hand, Hedda Gablerthis time directed by James Bundy and starring Marianna Gailus, it is a war horse.

Both plays are about entrapment, and both confound expectations. Anna, a pinup saint, is hindered by circumstances but frees herself. Hedda, the monster, steps back into a baroque ambush of her own making. In Anna and Hedda we see our best and worst selves, for who doesn’t wish things were different than they are? Viewed one after another, the plays reverse each other: The first is about the ability to change—to respond and evolve. The other is about egomania.

Each play consists of four acts and begins with the end of the journey. Hedda Gabler, the beautiful and selfish daughter of a poor general, has returned to Christiania (now Oslo) after a six-month honeymoon with her new husband, George Tesman; she is now Mrs. Tesman, but the play’s title underscores that her father, who has died, remains the center of her life. She marries the rambling, chatty Tesman as a last resort, but why she chooses him over the other suitors is unclear—he is as fragile as a dry leaf. Marianna Gailus plays Hedda so beautifully—like a top painted at high speed—and Max Gordon Moore is so devoted as her senile husband that, for a minute at least, we’re fascinated by him and ignore him. Hedda was just as fierce as Eris, who threw the golden apple and started the Trojan War. Its characteristics are egoism, cruelty, and dissociation. His interest is showing off, and his hobby is belittling. She insults George’s Aunt Juliane by mocking her new hat and pretending to mistake it for a lady’s maid’s. “What’s wrong with you, Hedda? Eh?” George asks, at the end of the first scene.

Yes, yes. The morning of Mrs. Thea Elvsted, her old school friend, has left her husband for Hedda’s former lover, Eilert Lövborg, an academic in George’s field who has written a best-selling book. (This is difficult to understand, as George’s work is about Brabant’s domestic industry during the Middle Ages.) Lövberg begins a new masterpiece but is hobbled by a drinking problem that Thea is determined to save. The second visitor is the greasy Judge Brack, who has his eye on Hedda. It wasn’t long before Hedda’s plans began to emerge. He would cut Thea off from Lövberg—why not?—and lure her back to the bottle. At his urging, Eilert and George went out of town. George came home before dawn. He had found Eilert’s precious manuscript on the street and given it to Hedda for safekeeping. When Eilert, raving, reappeared, he announced that he had destroyed the manuscript. Thea leaves in despair. Hedda gives Eilert a gun and urges him to kill himself: “Take it, and use it now…beautifully.” He hurried away; Hedda took the intact manuscript and put it in the fire. Eilert did shoot himself, in a gruesome and unlovely manner, in a brothel—the gun fired into his crotch. Judge Brack tells Hedda that he knows she gave Eilert the gun; the price of his silence is sexual pleasure. When George and Thea go upstairs to start trying to put together a manuscript from Thea’s notes, Hedda neatly shoots herself in the temple. Other antiheroines—Medea, Lady Macbeth—are evildoers for a reason, but the roots of Hedda’s drive to dominate and destroy are mysterious and stubborn. “This impulse came to me suddenly and I couldn’t resist it,” Hedda told Judge Brack. Like Daisy Buchanan—another virtuoso sociopath—she is reckless and likes to destroy everything.

O’Neill’s heroine Anna Christiethe daughter of a Swedish sailor, more miserable than careless. After his mother died, his father sent him to live with his cousins ​​in Minnesota to keep him away from the ocean, which he hated. As a child, Anna was worked almost to death on the family farm, then raped as a teenager. She ran away to Chicago and got a job as a babysitter but ended up on the streets. Anna’s early life was an amplitude of deprivation.

As the play opens, his father, Chris Christophersen, has received a letter from him at the poste restante—an Irish bar near the Boston docks. He swore abroad and became captain of a coal barge. Chris was very happy that Anna came to see him. (In one of the theater’s most graceful farewell scenes, his lover, Marthy, a tramp, tells him he will walk quickly to make room for Anna.) There are no pretty dresses for her: Anna steps off the evening train in a tattered coat and pinched hat. Like his father, we learn within minutes, he is a drinker. A happy tentative reunion ensues, and Anna—who is suspicious of the sea and regrets that her father is not the respectable janitor she thought he was—is convinced to come along on the coal barge. In Saint Ann’s, the opening scene in the bar is beautifully articulated. By the time Anna steps onto the stage, the relationship between Chris, the bartender, Johnny-the-Priest, and Marthy has played out so well, time after time, that their whiskey-soaked constellation captures Williams’s stranded Anna like a cosmic butterfly net.

While on the coal barge, Anna changed: she was happy as a clam. The stage goes dark, the waves churn, and a sailor, Mat Burke, is stranded on deck. Within moments, he claimed it as his own. His father objected. They fight over it. “Oh, you’ll think I’m just a piece of furniture!” Anna exclaimed (at Saint Ann’s, she protested from atop the table). At first she won’t say why she didn’t marry Mat, a coalman, but eventually she comes clean. He loves her, but he can’t marry her because he thinks she’s a good girl, which she’s not, and he won’t marry her under false pretenses. After the big outburst, Chris forgives him—he’s devastated by the consequences of his negligence. “Don’t cry about it,” Anna says to her father, which might sound like the manifesto we get from O’Neill: “After all, there’s nothing to forgive. It’s not your fault, it’s not mine, and it’s not his. We’re all poor madmen. And things happen.”

Her lover vows to shoot her. For veteran theatergoers, as O’Neill knows, Mat’s gun is bad news; it was bound to explode sooner or later. The fact that this doesn’t happen adds to the sad surprise of the plot. When Mat returns, all that matters to him is that Anna loves him, and this love, he believes, will redeem him. You’re not the same person now that you loved me, he said, and he meant it. Sometimes things are bad Don’t happen.

Hopefully so. Anna Christie is O’Neill’s most hopeful play. But to Ibsen’s Hedda, who is haunted by feelings of helplessness that make her want to degrade or manipulate others, everyone is just a piece of furniture. From Hedda Gabler we learn what happens—if we need reminding—when a person is addicted to show-off and betrayal, who likes pulling off spiders’ legs, when his egoism gets out of hand. Writing to me about one of the tragedies that occurred a few weeks ago, in Brown, in Sydney, in Los Angeles, in Boston, a friend said, “I don’t know how to handle it.”

Hedda Gabler’s enduring power is that we cannot forget her. “Is there something wrong with you, Hedda? Eh?” George asked. The question echoed throughout the corridors of time. What’s that? How can we fix it? The power of Anna Christie, the Limberlost girl who stood up and said, I’ll take whatever comes my way, but I know how to love, and I know how to tell the truth, is that we can.

Cynthia Zarin’s latest book is a novel Plantation And Winter And his collection The Next Day: New & Selected Poems.

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