<b>THE LADY FROM THE SEA</b> Court House Theatre/Shaw Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Shaw Festival
Through September 13
THE LADY FROM THE SEA Court House Theatre/Shaw Festival

For “The Lady from the Sea,” Erin Shields has boiled down Henrik Ibsen’s original to a 90-minute, one act play.
It features unhappy women, domineering men and a failure to communicate across the sexual barriers.
This was a very different time, not just Ibsen’s in the 19th century in the fjords of Norway but also ours, when male and female attitudes are so different and so similar to those of the playwright’s era.
Director Meg Roe and designer Camellia Koo have taken the written image of a small town locked into the fjord and winter for much of the year and built the Court House Theatre show around a giant piece of waterside rock in a garden.
Doctor Wangel (Ric Reid) is on his second marriage to the unhappy Ellida (Moya O’Connell), who is raising the doctor’s two daughters.
Stepmother and stepdaughters are all unhappy and trying to figure out how to get out of a situation.
The unhappiness of the daughters comes with the territory, two young women wanting to get out of a small town for something else…someplace else…someone else.
The unhappiness of the wife is less clear, until the daughter’s former tutor drifts into town, as does an ill sculptor.
Ellida Wangel starts to reconsider her status as an unhappy second wife and makes her unhappiness very clear.
The doctor thinks it’s because they lost a very young son and some medicine will cure the situation, although it doesn’t.
Finally, she spills her guts about the sailor from her days as the daughter of the lighthouse keeper and their linking of rings, which they saw as a sign of engagement and marriage.
Then, he disappeared, pursued by the police for stabbing his ship captain.
It’s been ten years but she still sees him in her dreams and more.
She’s surrounded by possible romance, potentially stepdaughter Bolette (Jacqueline Thair) either with her old tutor Professor Arnholm (Andrew Bunker) or with the ailing sculptor Hans Lyngstrand (Kyle Blair), while stepdaughter Hilde (Darcy Gerhart) just wants something else.
Mrs. Wangel wants to be free and return to the sea, not to this tiny village where the fjord water is dirty and cold year round.
There’s a lot of that in Ibsen, choices and freedom, choices for a better life, choices to escape a bad life and choices for women in a society with almost no choices, except of course, suicide.
Decisions are forced on everyone the night the last English boat makes its last summer run up and down the fjord.
The professor puts the moves on Bolette, only to discover she’s unhappy, but not unhappy enough to give up her dreams of independence and education.
Ellida has to persuade her husband to give her freedom.
He assumes she wants a divorce but that’s not quite what she wants.
The sailor returns and offers her one last chance to leave.
Ellida and Bolette have to make their decisions.
This is all supposed to strike a resonance with modern times, with modern choices for women and for men.
It doesn’t because it’s so contrived.
Choices are difficult, very difficult and the circumstances can be even more so.
I think Shields’ idea was to cut out Ibsen’s usual long-windedness…comparable often to George Bernard Shaw…and boil it down almost to a computer coding situation…if/then.
There are incredible back stories here, as well as the usual life situations: getting away from home, making a marriage work and a professor’s need for a wife to run his life.
Faced with these situations today, would people make the same choices? Yes, no and maybe.
Shields doesn’t quite succeed in staying in Ibsen’s time nor moving it to the present.
I also couldn’t figure out why Neil Barclay’s Ballested is in the script since the artist seems little more than a signpost saying: Action ahead.
There are some strong performances, Reid’s lost Dr. Wangel; Bunker’s careerist Arnholm; Thair’s Bolette.
I didn’t like O’Connell’s Ellida.
Clearly with the direction of Roe, if there had been a rug on the set, O’Connell would have chewed it to shreds, really, really over the top.
Fortunately, "The Lady from the Sea" is only 90 minutes and that makes it worth seeing if you appreciate Ibsen’s life questions.

A.W.