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Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 masterpiece “Hedda Gabler” tells the story of a big woman newly locked into a confining marriage with a small man – at a time when there were limited options for what women could do with their lives. 

“Hedda” is part of a series of plays – including “A Doll’s House”– that Ibsen wrote at the end of the 19th century about restless, unsatisfied women. These works went on to be seminal pieces in the evolution of modern drama. 

On Thursday, Berkeley’s wonderfully talented Aurora Theater opened a challenging and thoughtful production of Ibsen’s difficult and complex play, in a new adaptation by gay male New York playwright Jon Robin Baltz. 

A blueprint for the well-made play, “Hedda Gabler” is a gossipy and vicious story of domestic intrigue, well-suited to the tiny, intimate 50-seat Aurora performance space at the Berkeley City Club, where audience members sit within a foot of the performers. 

In “Hedda Gabler,” newlyweds Hedda (Stacy Ross) and George (Steve Marvel) arrive home after an awkward five-month honeymoon to the expansive and dangerously credit-financed house that scholar George hopes pay for with a pending academic appointment. 

Hedda is immediately out of sorts with her life, having married a man she doesn’t love, because it was the time in her life to get married. 

When old flames and would be lovers appear – sensing her loveless marriage – Hedda schemes desperately, vengefully and willfully to control those in her unhappy social arena. 

The play is a little bit like Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with touches of Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” and the television show "Dynasty" thrown in. 

The story hits powerfully on the polar conflict themes of money and poverty, family and orphaning, friendship and enmity, men and women, work and idleness, generosity and blackmail, creativity and ordinariness. 

The success of any production of this play turns greatly on the performance of the complex character of Hedda. As with great Shakespearean characters, an actor has options to play the character of Hedda in varying ways. 

In part, Hedda is a princess – a high-maintenance interloper into George’s stable middle-class family. She is a beautiful woman who often reacts with negativity to the kind things others say. Of one acquaintance, she remarks, “She had very irritating hair.” 

Regal and controlling, icy and manipulative, Hedda is part Strindberg vixen from hell. She has a fondness for shooting her father’s pistols at men who frustrate her. 

The trick with Hedda, for both actor and director, is to find some understanding of how much Hedda is a victim of the social repressions of the society around her, and how much she is just plain nuts. And what the connection is, if any, between the two. 

In Stacy Ross’ interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying Aurora performance, this connection and understanding aren’t quite achieved. 

In Ross’ performance, there are places where the character is psychologically unbalanced, places where she is angry, and places where she is a victim of her social circumstances, but the performance jumps back and forth among these states, and never quite finds a center. 

The viciousness, self-hatred, angry craziness and evil of the character flash from time to time, but don’t come through in full force. 

At times, this Hedda seems more like a deer caught in the headlights, than a malevolent architect of conflict. But it is hard to believe this interpretation of a character who is trapped and struggling in a world in which she is generally the most powerful person. 

Steve Marvel is wonderful as Hedda’s simple husband George, an emotional, conjugal and sexual naïf.  

A university philological aspirant, George is an amiable young man most excited by the time he spends rooting through old documents. 

Navigating cheerfully and obliviously among the conflicts between his wife and those around her, George’s capacity for emotional misunderstanding is enormous. 

Elizabeth Benedict takes a wonderful turn as George’s proper but kind aunt Julia, abused back-handedly in each of her encounters with Hedda. 

Marvin Greene is a somewhat flat and predictable as Lovborg, the reformed black sheep tempted by Hedda to travel once again to the dark side. 

Beth Donohue is believable as a nervous and fearful former schoolmate of Hedda’s, manipulated mercilessly by the control freaks around her, but holding steady in the end because of her good heart. 

Julian Lopez-Morillas turns in a marvelous performance as charming, manipulative Judge Brack, in Baltz’s adaptation a slippery bi-sexual hedonist angling for an affair with Hedda. 

Even with the limitations that this production hits, this is a fascinating evening of theater. "Hedda Gabler" is a classic story of a trophy wife at a loss about who she is and what to do with her life, who puts her intelligence into making other people unhappy. 

This turn-of-the-century, proto-Freudian theater, was written at a time when explicit psychiatric subtexts were first beginning to creep into modern drama. Nowadays, we might say that the people in this play have poorly nurtured inner children. 

Planet theater reviewer John Angell Grant has written for “American Theatre,”  

“Callboard,” and many other  

publications. E-mail him at  

jagplays@yahoo.com.