Arin Arbus ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Simon Godwin ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE
Robert E. Buckholz CHAIR
Jeffrey Horowitz FOUNDING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY
Dorothy Ryan EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Angela Lee Gieras EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR &
Present
by HENRIK IBSEN
in a new version by DAVID ELDRIDGE directed by SIMON GODWIN
On the Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage Featuring
KATIE BROAD, MELANIE FIELD, ALEXANDER HURT, MAHIRA KAKKAR, DAVID PATRICK KELLY, MAAIKE LAANSTRA-CORN, BOBBY PLASENCIA, MATTHEW SALD Í VAR, ALEXANDER SOVRONSKY, ROBERT STANTON, NICK WESTRATE
Scenic Designer ANDREW BOYCE
Costume Designer HEATHER C. FREEDMAN
Hair & Wig Designer SATELLITE WIGS
Lighting Designer STACEY DEROSIER
Movement and Fight Director JACOB GRIGOLIA-ROSENBAUM
Production Stage Manager SHANE SCHNETZLER
Casting JACK DOULIN
Sound Designer DARRON L WEST Properties Supervisor JON KNUST
Voice Director ANDREW WADE
Press Representative BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES
First preview September 2, 2025 | Opening night September 14, 2025
Production Dramaturg JONATHAN KALB
General Manager CHLOE KNIGHT
World premiere commissioned by and first presented at the Donmar Warehouse on December 8, 2005. Theatre for a New Audience dedicates this season to the memory of Dr. Leonard S. Polonsky CBE
Additional generous support for this production has been provided by The Arete Foundation, The Brandt Jackson Foundation, Monica Gerard-Sharp and Dominica Wambold, and the Norwegian Consulate General in New York.
2025-2026 Season Sponsors
Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by Alan Beller and Stephanie Neville, The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation, Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine, The Charina Endowment Fund, Constance Christensen, The Hearst Foundations, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at the New York Community Trust, The Polonsky Foundation, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation. Major season support is provided by The Achelis and Bodman Foundation, Sally Brody, Agnes Gund, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, The Hearst Corporation, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Marcia Riklis, The Starry Night Fund, Stockel Family Foundation, Anne and William Tatlock, The Tow Foundation, Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein, and The White Cedar Fund.
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
(in alphabetical order)
Miss Pettersen.................................................................................................................................................. KATIE BROAD
Gina Ekdal...................................................................................................................................................MELANIE FIELD
Gregers Werle.........................................................................................................................................ALEXANDER HURT
Mrs Sørby..................................................................................................................................................MAHIRA KAKKAR
Old Ekdal........................................................................................................................................DAVID PATRICK KELLY
Hedvig.......................................................................................................................................MAAIKE LAANSTRA-CORN
Mr Flor....................................................................................................................................................BOBBY PLASENCIA
Relling/Captain Balle..........................................................................................................................MATTHEW SALDÍVAR
Jensen.........................................................................................................................................ALEXANDER SOVRONSKY
Håkon Werle...........................................................................................................................................ROBERT STANTON
Hjalmar Ekdal............................................................................................................................................NICK WESTRATE
Understudies never substitute for the listed players unless a specific announcement is made at the time of the appearance. For Miss Pettersen Tracie Lane
Production Stage Manager...................................................................................................................SHANE SCHNETZLER
Assistant Stage Manager.............................................................................................................MICHELLE LAUREN TUITE
Fight Captain...............................................................................................................................................MELANIE FIELD
Time and Place: 1880s, a city in Norway.
Part I
Act I: Håkon Werle’s House, evening.
Act II: Hjalmar Ekdal’s studio, later that evening.
Act III: Hjalmar Ekdal’s studio, the following morning.
Part II
Act IV: Hjalmar Ekdal’s studio, late that afternoon.
Act V: Hjalmar Ekdal’s studio, the following morning.
Part I is approximately 70 minutes, and Part II is 60 minutes. There will be a 15-minute intermission between Parts I and II.
Music in our production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.
Sound Designer Darron West and Music Director Alexander Sovronsky have pulled from 19th century Norwegian music to create the soundscape you're hearing today. Among the composers whose music is being utilized is Ole Bull, a celebrated Norwegian violinist and composer who was instrumental in the creation of Norway's National Theatre where many of Ibsen's works were premiered, including The Wild Duck in 1885. Ole Bull wrote music that drew on the Romantic Classical style at the time as well as Norwegian folk songs. He wrote works for violin that tried to emulate the Hardinger Fiddle, a traditional 9-stringed instrument of his homeland. Onstage you will see and hear Alexander Sovronsky's arrangements of some of this music performed on an Octave Violin, a Hardinger Fiddle, and a Langeleik, a Norwegian instrument similar to a Lap Dulcimer.
This Theatre operates under an agreement between the League of Resident Theatres and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
The stage managers employed in this production are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.
The scenic, costume, lighting, and sound designers in LORT Theatres are represented by United Scenic Artists, Local USA-829 of the IATSE.
The Director is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, Inc., an independent national labor union.
5 Biography: Henrik Ibsen by Jonathan Kalb
6 Interview: "Living at the Speed of Life" with Simon Godwin by Jonathan Kalb
11 Dialogues: "'It was as if he meant something different from what he said all the time': Language, Metaphysics and the Everyday in The Wild Duck " by Toril Moi
23 Bios: Cast and Creative Team
28 About Theatre For a New Audience
Notes
Front Cover: Design by Paul Davis Studio / Paige Restaino
This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated September 18, 2025.
Credits
The Wild Duck 360° | Edited by Zoe Donovan Resident Dramaturg: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Tanya Pollard | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc.
Publisher: Theatre for a New Audience, Arin Arbus, Artistic Director
The Wild Duck 360° Copyright 2025 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserve d.
With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electr onic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted with permission of their authors or publishers.
Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle. Photo by Hollis King.
JONATHAN KALB
The scion of an impoverished family from an out-of-the-way corner of a peripheral country devoid of strong cultural institutions, Ibsen rose to become one of the prime generative forces of modern drama. His father, a prosperous merchant in the small Norwegian port town of Skien, descended into bitterness and alcoholism after his business collapsed in 1834 and his eldest son Henrik’s formal education ceased at age 15 when he was sent to become a pharmacist’s assistant. Miserable and lonely, he became a voracious reader and a keen observer of people. He also, at age 18, impregnated a servant in the shop, 10 years older, and was forced to pay child support for the next 16 years for a son he probably never met. Both these calamities would deeply inform his 1884 play The Wild Duck, whose characters include a bankrupt old man who brought shame to his family and a former servant possibly impregnated by her employer.
The young Ibsen had strong radical sympathies. He wrote his first play Catiline flush with enthusiasm for revolutionary romanticism after the 1848 European uprisings. After failing his university entrance exams, he took a job at a theater in Bergen, which broadened his horizons by sending him on foreign theatergoing trips. Over the next decade he acquired extensive practical theater experience—writing, producing and directing many different types of plays. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thoresen who gave birth in 1859 to their only child, Sigurd (later a prominent Norwegian politician). The family’s finances were precarious, and Ibsen was threatened with debtor’s prison. With help from friends and a small government grant, he left Norway in 1864 and lived abroad for the next 27 years.
All the plays that established Ibsen’s career were written in exile. He lived aloof from all but the most intimate friends and family in Rome, Dresden and Munich. His epic verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867)—both dazzlingly imaginative blends of folklore and psychological observation—won recognition and respect throughout Scandinavia. It was his series of prose dramas written between 1877 and 1899, however, set in middle-class Norwegian homes—including A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, and Rosmersholm —that made him a household name in Europe, selling out large editions, receiving prominent productions, and sparking passionate debates.
In the mid 1880s, Ibsen became uneasy about his public idolatry. After A Doll’s House (1879) made him a cause célèbre for women’s rights advocates, Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the Peopl e (1882) spurred other social reformers to claim him as a champion as well. He therefore deliberately set out in his next play, The Wild Duck (1884), to relegate social criticism to the background. The Wild Duck brought a new tone into Ibsenian drama—tragicomedy—that not only provided strange new pleasures but also prevented him from being pigeonholed with easy labels and theses. George Bernard Shaw called this unique work a satire of “sham Ibsenism.”
Ibsen would go on to write much more pathbreaking drama, including several plays after his 1891 return to Norway that stretched beyond realism. Through his career, the skewering of moribund idealisms would be central to his spirit .
This is an edited version of an interview on August 20, 2025 with director Simon Godwin and TFANA’s Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb
JONATHAN KALB Let’s start with the origin question. Jeffrey Horowitz and I discussed several possible plays with you for production this year and you settled on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Why?
SIMON GODWIN The Wild Duck’s been in the back of my mind for over two decades. I heard about David Eldridge’s version when it was produced at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2005, directed by Michael Grandage. Interestingly, I never saw that production, but I read about it. There was a huge amount of interest and debate around the play and David’s version. The memory haunted me in a very, dare I say, Ibsen-like way, so when Jeffrey asked me for ideas for a third collaboration with TFANA—after Measure for Measure (2017) and Timon of Athens (2020)—I ordered a copy of David’s version and actually sat down and read it. I was struck immediately by
the power of the story, the intensity of the characters, and how the theme of parenting affected me. I’m a father of three children, and this is a very intense study of fathers and sons, fathers and daughters. The play is known for locating the political within the personal, but the prism of the family is what I found so fascinating.
KALB Have you directed Ibsen before?
GODWIN No, I haven’t. I’ve directed quite a bit of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, but Ibsen is, perhaps, the thirteenth man at the table, whom I’ve never dined with until now.
KALB What do you mean by that?
GODWIN The symbol of the thirteenth man at the table comes up three times in The Wild Duck. Ibsen asks us to think about what it invokes. Is this man Judas? Or Jesus? Is he a figure of disruption or redemption?
KALB You’re making it sound like you were avoiding Ibsen.
GODWIN I think I hadn’t found my way to Ibsen. I found him daunting, perhaps a little heavy, or schematic. I couldn’t find a personal way in. But, then, the story of children and parents offered me a way to the play’s heart. I finally found access to the emotionalism of Ibsen’s writing.
KALB The Wild Duck will run at your theater, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, after its Brooklyn run. Do you see a connection between Ibsen and Shakespeare?
GODWIN They’re both dramatists of big ideas—of outsize ambition and huge emotion. Shakespeare, however, is principally invested in the now; his characters make as many decisions in the present as they possibly can. Ibsen is fascinated by how the past catches up with us. This makes the machinations of an Ibsen text different from the teeming vitality of one by Shakespeare. In the rehearsal room with The Wild Duck I feel more like a detective looking for clues from the past, or a psychoanalyst.
KALB The Wild Duck is a deeply admired canonical work, but it isn’t produced very often. Why do you think that is?
GODWIN The play is twisty and provocative. Unlike A Doll’s House , it has no clear, single protagonist. There’s an ensemble of characters jostling for our attention and our sympathies. The play asks us to shift our loyalties a great deal. It has some light, even witty moments, and then some extremely dark moments. The play contains audacious contrasts which are exhilarating and daunting to direct.
KALB The play’s detractors have called it dark and depressing. What’s your response to that?
GODWIN With plays that have a reputation for heft, I try to discover, if I can, a kind of contrasting effervescence. Human beings, as someone wise once said to me, move away from pain. Very few people are ever consciously trying to make their life worse. We are all trying to make our lives better. Sadly, in doing that, we occasionally unwittingly invite catastrophe. My job, whether it’s Shakespeare or Ibsen, Macbeth or The Wild Duck , is to find the radiance, to find the light that’s motivating the characters, for good or ill.
KALB What do you think is the central conflict in this play? Is it whatever is going on between Gregers and Hjalmar? Or between Gregers and Relling? Something else?
GODWIN The question of how much truth we all can take is central to this play. I think of this every time I walk past an advertisement asking whether I want to have some medical scan to check whether I might have some inherent condition or illness. I fluctuate between “I want to know” and “I don’t want to know.” Right now, I’d rather live in blissful ignorance than in painful knowledge. But the same information might save my life. I would suggest that each of us every day is negotiating how much truth we can take, how much truth we want, how much truth we can bear.
Ibsen coins the term “life-lie” in this play, and you might think that he’s talking about something corrosive or nefarious. Arguably, however, this is our salvation; the life-lie is a story, a fiction we tell to survive. In the play Gregers comes along and says, effectively, to live with integrity, to live with freedom, we need to know everything about ourselves. We need to embrace the truth at whatever price, because the
David Eldridge, Writer.
truth has its own luminosity. And we watch this very debate play out throughout the show.
KALB Gregers is an extreme case, though, someone often seen as hateful. Ibsen’s previous play, Enemy of the People, also featured a committed truth-teller, Thomas Stockmann, but he was presented as a kind of hero, even though he too had complications. Gregers is like Stockmann on steroids, Stockmann intensified to the nth degree, to where he’s a kind of purist, or ideological monster. What’s Ibsen’s reason for introducing such a person into a home that is perfectly happy before he arrives?
GODWIN The play asks how much we can or should intervene in other people’s lives. It also asks, what is happiness? Gregers believes that his best friend has deeply compromised himself. He feels Hjalmar is suffering from a series of delusions that are inhibiting his potential. So, for the benefit of his friend, and indeed for his whole family, he gives him the chance to know the truth about his life. Yes, Gregers has been viewed as a fanatic. But any psychoanalyst would, in
some sense, identify with his mission to facilitate the discovery of truth. The tragic outcome of that mission is accidental. Catastrophe was never his intention.
KALB The play contains another character who also thinks he knows better what’s good for the Ekdals: Dr. Relling. Relling looks at the same man, Hjalmar Ekdal, and says, “I know what he needs. Not more truth, but a reinforced life-lie—a life-lie I will keep inflating as long as I can.” Gregers and Relling reach opposite conclusions about what Hjalmar needs, and vie with each other to have their way. What do you make of that confrontation?
GODWIN That’s the collision we’re left with in the end. And it reminds me of Shakespeare and of his love of antithesis and paradox. Here again we have two truths that are opposite yet coexistent. To be or not to be; to dream or not to dream; to live in painful truths or enabling lies? As the play concludes, we move into archetypal territory where we’re invited to see the action as a metaphor for two forces grappling inside each of our souls: the wish to know and the wish not to know.
KALB How do you see Hjalmar, the object of their grappling? Is he a fool?
GODWIN As a director, one’s job is to try to identify with as many of the characters on the stage as possible. I must bring empathy and sympathy, not judgement. Hjalmar, like many of us, has big dreams and is sustained by a belief that one day he’s going to do something extraordinary. The play is exploring whether that might be rather a good thing—to have a certain degree of delusion. I know I have them. The absence of this feeling can lead people to feel very unhappy. A healthy ego has a happy and effectively delusionary component. Hjalmar has undergone suffering but has constructed a mechanism he can live by. And it’s a delicate mechanism. The play is partly advocating for care around the structures we’ve carefully built to live by.
KALB Fair enough. But does Ibsen really allow us to buy into his self-importance? Can we believe in the reality of his invention, that he’s seriously working on it, or that it will ever see the light of day?
GODWIN The play has a satiric edge, which asks, “Oh, yeah, is this invention real?” Ibsen is consciously articulating a sense that just because the invention may not be real, that doesn’t mean it is not needed. The invention Hjalmar says he is working on is essentially a metaphor for the fictions we must and do tell ourselves.
KALB Maybe that can bring us back to parenting, and Shakespeare. In her well-known book on Ibsen, the critic Toril Moi compared The Wild Duck to King Lear. She said both plays were not only about how much truth people can bear but also about the tragic avoidance of love. Lear and Hjalmar both avoid the love of a loyal and adoring child, with tragic consequences. Hjalmar’s rebuff of his daughter Hedwig triggers The Wild Duck’s climax. Does this comparison ring true for you?
GODWIN I’m reluctant to embrace it insofar as Hjalmar absolutely loves his daughter. The scene you’re referring to is poignant and heartbreaking, and it evokes the heartbreak of parenting. As parents, we are in a space of emotion and reaction, and tragically, sometimes we take things out on our children. We don’t wish to, and we suffer enormous regret when we do—whether it’s shouting or lack of compassion or impatience—but parents all know what this feels like. Hjalmar undergoes a crisis in the play, and for a short time blames his child, and that has terrible consequences. But has he
been a consistently bad parent, or somebody who has consistently not loved his child? You must decide.
KALB Do you entirely reject the comparison to Lear ?
GODWIN Lear summons a storm, figuratively and literally, at the beginning of the play through his closed sightedness to love and must go on a journey of illumination. The Wild Duck asks if such illumination is even possible.
KALB I’d like to ask you about the play’s theatricality. Some critics have called The Wild Duck a tragicomedy, and pointed out that it has a different kind of theatricality from the prose plays written before it. A Doll’s House has a tarantella dance and there’s a riot in Enemy of the People , but none of those earlier plays have the comic dimension this one does. Do you have thoughts about this?
GODWIN Well, first of all, I would refute that it’s a tragicomedy. Comedy has connotations, in a Shakespearean sense, of a happy ending, which this
Matthew Saldívar as Relling, Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig. Photo by Hollis King.
does not have. This is a satiric study of the human condition that has dives between contrasting tones. I’m still learning what genre it belongs to!
KALB Well, let me push back just a little bit, because yesterday, watching you rehearse Act Three, I felt that the energy was indeed creeping toward the farcical. Everything was moving so fast, and you observed yourself that the action was asking us to look here, and then there, and then over there. The play was constantly redirecting our attention, throwing a lot of different things at us. To me, that’s what’s meant by the play’s explicit theatricality. Are you saying that this requires no special attention from you?
GODWIN I’m encouraging the actors to play at what I call the speed of life. And the speed of life is quick, “as swift as meditation”, as Hamlet says. No one has any time to think. And any life viewed close up is intrinsically strange and sometimes funny. But these characters do not for a second feel like they are in a comedy, they are not doing anything to consciously generate laughter from anybody. I’m encouraging the actors to stay in their character’s reality, even though those watching may react in all sorts of rich and complex ways. And this is where I agree with Ibsen—the more complex the responses are in the audience, the better.
KALB Can I ask you about the play’s ending? What do you think the audience should take away from it?
GODWIN Peter Brook once told me that when it comes to Q&As, he prefers the Qs to the As. That’s my feeling around the ending. Ibsen organizes it around a tragic event and then gives us two people debating what the meaning of that event is. That’s quite a radical gesture. The rest is not silence. The rest, in this case, is urgent, ongoing debate about what we are here for.
KALB The two people in question are Gregers and Relling. Can the audience accept characters like them as agents of debate they should listen to? Both are so compromised by then.
GODWIN Gregers, who is inadvertently responsible for a terrible event, maintains at the end that the tragedy will come to mean something. The trauma will, in some painful way, forge a new maturity in those suffering it. Relling rejects this—they won’t be changed by it, he claims. It was a terrible event and no new wisdom will ensue. This point certainly connects to Lear. We feel that
Lear sees better after the horrors he has witnessed. He’s grown because of what he’s faced. But in The Wild Duck, this idea is challenged. It’s as if someone in the audience has risen at the end of Lear and called back to the stage, “No, he hasn’t grown. He was a damaged and broken man at the beginning, and the idea that these horrors have made him a better or nicer person is sentimental cant.” Look at our world. See all the suffering. How can we insist that it necessarily yields wisdom?
JONATHAN KALB is TFANA’s Resident Dramaturg and professor of theatre at Hunter College, CUNY. The author of five books on theatre, he has worked for more than three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist, and dramaturg. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theatre book from the Theatre Library Association. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at www.jonathankalb.com.
BY TORIL MOI
Hedvig. [D]et er jo bare et loft.
Gregers ( ser fast på hende ). Er De så viss på det?
Hedvig ( forbauset ). At det er et loft!
Gregers. Ja, ved De det så sikkert?
Hedvig ( tier og ser på ham med åben mund ).
[ Hedvig. [I]t’s only a loft.
Gregers ( looking steadily at her ). Are you so sure of that?
Hedvig ( astonished ). That it’s a loft!
Gregers. Yes. Do you know that for certain?
Hedvig ( says nothing and looks at him, open- mouthed ).]
Excerpted from Toril Moi's "Metaphysics and the Everyday in The Wild Duck.". New Literary History 33:4 (2002), p.655-658 and 664-680. © 2002 New Literary History. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. All quotes from The Wild Duck are the author's own translation of Hundreårsutgave: Henrik Ibsens samlede verker, ed. Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht, and Didrik Arup Seip, vol. 10, 21 vols. (1884; Oslo, 1928–57).
To its first audiences, The Wild Duck (1884) was utterly baffling. “Publikum ved verken ud eller ind,” the Norwegian writer Henrik Jæger noted, “og af den Kritik som fremkommer, skal detikke blive klogere, thi den ene Avis siger det ene og den anden det andet” (The audience doesn’t know which way to turn, and from the current reviews it will get no wiser, for one newspaper says one thing and the other another). Foreign audiences did not find the play any easier to understand. “Browning was obscure...But Browning at his worst is nought compared with Ibsen,” one British critic complained when the play opened in London in 1894. The problem seemed above all to be the so-called “symbolism” of the wild duck itself. In Paris members of the first audiences at Antoine’s 1891 production quacked like ducks every time the poor bird was mentioned. The respected French critic Francisque Sarcey summed it up: “Oh! that wild duck, absolutely nobody ever, no, nobody, neither you who have seen the play, nor Lindenlaub and
Ephraim who translated it word for word, nor the author who wrote it, nor Shakespeare who inspired it, nor God or the Devil, no, no one will ever know what that wild duck is, neither what it’s doing in the play, nor what it means.”
As derision ceased and The Wild Duck became generally acknowledged as one of Ibsen’s greatest plays, critics went to the other extreme. Far from declaring the duck to be meaningless, they now uncovered ever more subtle layers of meaning in what they took to be Ibsen’s profound symbol. But as Errol Durbach points out, this is simply to repeat Gregers Werle’s attitude towards the wild duck. “Ibsen, at the height of his power as a symbolist, assigns no portentous symbolic value whatever to the duck,” Durbach writes. “He merely presents it as the vehicle for the ridiculous duck-symbolism of Gregers, for whom all surface reality is a system of transcendental referents.”
I agree with Durbach that the idea that the duck has to mean something is entirely of Gregers’s making. But that is because the word “meaning” here is used in a
rather special way. Otherwise it would make no sense to blame Gregers for the incessant interpretation of the wild duck, since already in act 1, Håkon Werle, Gregers’s rich industrialist father, compares certain kinds of people to wild ducks: “Der gives mennesker her i verden, som dukker til bunds bare de får et par hagel i kroppen, og så kommer de aldrig op igen mere” (There are people in this world who plunge to the bottom when they get a couple of shots in the body, and then they never come up again). But Sarcey was presumably not driven to intellectual despair because he could not grasp the idea that some characters are in some respects like the wild duck in the Ekdals’ loft. Thus Old Ekdal has given up the struggle for life after being emotionally destroyed by a prison sentence, Hedvig is innocent, wounded, and fragile, and Hjalmar has, like the duck in her basket, grown contentedly fat in his narrowed circumstances. “I do realize all that,” Sarcey might well have said to me had I tried to be helpful by pointing out these parallels, “but that is obvious, something anyone can see. That is not what I mean by the meaning of the wild duck.” To which I would reply that if one presses the meaning of “meaning” in this way, pretty quickly nothing will count as the meaning of the wild duck. So the quest comes to seem hopeless.
Sarcey’s despair of ever grasping the meaning of the wild duck, then, is fueled by a sense that to “understand” the wild duck must be to grasp something far deeper, altogether more meaningful, more mysterious, than any ordinary comparisons and parallels will yield. Literary critics have followed in his footsteps ever since. This is precisely Gregers’s attitude, too. To him, the wild duck cannot be just a wild duck, she has to be a sign of something else, something beyond the surface of everyday phenomena. Given this attitude, Gregers is only one step away from melodrama. By “melodrama” here I simply mean the tendency to “pressure the surface of reality,” as Peter Brooks puts it, the drive to create “drama—an exciting, excessive, parabolic story—from the banal stuff of reality.” The drive to invent flattering melodramatic stories for oneself or others is not limited to Gregers; it is everywhere in The Wild Duck (Hjalmar doesn’t stop, and Dr. Relling works overtime to provide exciting plots for others to live by). Gregers’s constant gesturing towards a world of absolutes beyond the veil of appearances, moreover, shows that to him, ordinary life, everyday people, things, and activities are worthless unless they can be invested with some great metaphysical drama.
Gregers is pushed towards melodrama by his philosophy. He is like the man in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations who becomes theatrical in his effort to stress his own unique, isolated interiority: “I have seen a person in a discussion of this subject strike himself on the breast and say: ‘But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!’—The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatic stressing of the word ‘this.’” Wittgenstein shows us a man who feels that nobody else can know what he knows about himself. This is precisely the position of Gregers: throughout the play he is convinced that he understands others, that he knows what they need and want. His loneliness, his self-declared love of solitude and unfitness for marriage, however, tell us that he is equally convinced that nobody could ever understand him. (The same is true of Dr. Relling.) This is one of the classical positions of skepticism. But we should not judge Gregers too harshly. For he is no Savonarola, but rather, like Johannes Rosmer in Rosmersholm, a latterday romantic with a broken heart.
In The Wild Duck Hjalmar Ekdal embodies a narcissistic and self-pitying theatricality that is more explicitly melodramatic than Gregers’s portentous pronouncements. Yet Hjalmar too turns his back on the everyday. As I shall show, both Gregers’s absolutist metaphysics and Hjalmar’s extreme theatricality are forms of rejection of the everyday. This rejection becomes evident when one listens to the way they speak. The way they use words reveals how far they have drifted away from the ordinary and the everyday.—Here I should say that I will use the terms “ordinary” and “everyday” fairly interchangeably, although Wittgenstein tends to speak of the everyday, whereas J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell usually speak of ordinary language and ask “what we should ordinarily say.” Although there are significant differences between the three thinkers, the everyday and the ordinary are, at the very least, closely related concepts. Most significantly for my purposes, they both indicate a resistance to metaphysics (Wittgenstein), and particularly to the form of metaphysics called skepticism (Austin, Cavell).
If we get transfixed by the idea that the wild duck must be either a symbol or an allegory, or at the very least some special kind of really deep metaphor, we will fail to notice that the wild duck is just one element in Ibsen’s much wider investigation of language. The most important question in The Wild Duck is not at all what the eponymous wild duck means (and certainly not what it “means” in a deep sense), but whether it is possible to hang onto meaning at all in a world full of cynics, skeptics, and narcissists, who all do their best to empty words of meaning. To put it somewhat differently: The Wild Duck is about the disasters that ensue when we turn our backs on the everyday. This must not be taken to mean that we have much choice in the matter. To lose touch with the meaning of our words is part of the human condition. The Wild Duck is so poignant and so powerful because it knows this.
The Wild Duck is full of housework. Gina, in particular, is always tirelessly working. She cleans and dusts; she makes herring salad, coffee, and sandwiches for her self-pitying husband and his guests; she serves the men at table and clears up after them, often with the help of Hedvig. Moreover, and in spite of Hjalmar’s great proclamations about his responsibilities as the breadwinner of the family, she is also the one who earns a living for the family. While Hjalmar digests his
copious meals on the sofa, Gina deals with clients, takes photographs, retouches them with the help of Hedvig, and takes care of the household finances.
At the very beginning of act 3, Ibsen inserts a story that contrasts Gina’s housework with Gregers’s total lack of practical sense. Strictly speaking unnecessary for the plot, the story contributes crucial elements to the characterization of Gregers, and so to the philosophical concerns of the play. At this point Gregers has just broken with his father, and moved into the Ekdal’s spare room. He instantly refuses all help from servants. Here is Gina’s account of the ensuing events:
[ Gina. Well, he wanted to manage for himself, he said. So he was going to light the fire too, and then he closed down the damper so the whole room got full of smoke. Ugh! what a stink! Like a— Hjalmar. Oh dear.
Gina. But here’s the best bit, because then of course he wants to put it out, and so he pours all his washing water into the stove, so the floor’s swimming in the worst filth. Hjalmar. What a nuisance.
Gina. I got the porter’s wife to come and scrub up after him, the pig; but it won’t be fit to live in until this afternoon.]
Gregers is here pointedly portrayed as someone to whom the most basic tasks of everyday life are foreign. Gregers himself is clearly ignorant of his own limitations, for he thinks that he can manage without help. Given that he obviously cannot, this scene tells us that he has never in his life paid any attention to everyday chores. To him, housework has been invisible, unacknowledged, a set of tasks that go without saying.
Some readers of this scene have found it utterly unrealistic, and have concluded that it was included purely for comic effect. Such readers take Gregers’s talk of his fifteen years of solitude up at the iron works at Højdal to mean that he has lived a solitary life in the woods. Surely, they say, such a man would know very well how to make a fire. This scene, however, reveals that we should not take Gregers’s talk about solitude too literally. Gregers speaks of himself as a brooding and ungregarious man, incapable of marriage. Yet he has not actually lived alone in the woods at Højdal, for already in act 1 we learn that during all those years he has worked in some supervisory capacity for his father, the owner of the ironworks. Later on, Dr. Relling informs us that Gregers also spent considerable time and effort going around trying to elevate the souls of
“LANGUAGE,
the workers at the ironworks. Compared to the high social life of his industrialist father (exemplified by the party scene in act 1), Gregers’s life has been simple and relatively solitary. But the scene we are considering here shows that he has not been without servants. We can safely assume that he has, at the very minimum, had a woman to cook and clean and make fires for him. When Gregers speaks of his solitude he means that he has lived in self-imposed exile from formal society. To him, then, solitude means not seeing fellow members of the bourgeoisie socially.
Turning his back to the ordinary and the everyday, Gregers wants an ideal to worship. His fatal mistake is to take Hjalmar to be that ideal. To him, Hjalmar is extraordinary, unique, special: “Nej, en almindelig mand; det kan så være. Men en mand som du—!” he says to Hjalmar. (No, an ordinary man; that may well be. But a man like you—!). There may be more than a touch of homoerotic libido in the unmarrying Gregers’s starry-eyed idealization of Hjalmar. But whatever its source, his idealization of Hjalmar is based on the conviction that Hjalmar is not ordinary. To Gregers, everyday practices and words can never be the source of values. This is the flip-side of his thoroughgoing idealism. Gregers, in short, is lost in metaphysics.
[Hjalmar. As you can imagine, when I decided to devote myself to photography, it wasn’t in order to go around here and take portraits of all sorts of everyday people.
Gregers. No, of course not, that’s what your wife just said too. Hjalmar. I swore that if I was going to dedicate my powers to this craft, then I would raise it so high as to make it both an art and a science. And so I decided to make this astonishing invention.
Gregers. And what does the invention consist in? What’s the idea behind it?
Hjalmar. Oh, well, you mustn’t ask for details just yet. It all takes time, you know.]
Despising the ordinary people photography exposes him to, Hjalmar dreams of art and science, fame and recognition. He imagines a scenario in which he, the poor misunderstood inventor, dies unrecognized by all. Shortly after his death, however, his invention wins the fame it deserves, so that his family is restored to bourgeois life, and the name of Ekdal is again without blemish. This, of course, is exactly the kind of melodrama the European stage was serving up all the time in the 1880s. The irony is that Hjalmar’s refusal of the ordinary virtually
guarantees that he will never invent anything at all, for only someone who actually practiced photography with some passion and respect for the medium would be in a position to discover ways to improve its techniques.
We see that Gregers’s and Hjalmar’s rejections of the ordinary are also exercises in sex and class prejudice. For them, to reject the ordinary is to refuse to acknowledge the humanity of “ordinary people.” (By “humanity” here I just mean the fact of being a human being, the fact of being neither more nor less human than the person who refuses to acknowledge others as human.) There is in both of them a strong romantic streak, a faith in the power of the exceptional person, the prophet, the seer, the savior. They, the chosen ones, the exceptional ones, cling to the belief that they are different (superior) in kind to the rest of humanity. This is how they endow themselves with identity. The problem with returning to the everyday, then, is that it would mean returning to a life in which nobody is more or less human than anyone else.
This does not apply to Gina, who shares Gregers’s conviction that Hjalmar is extraordinary:
[Gina. Yes, and it really isn’t anything for a man like Ekdal to go here and take portraits of the hoi polloi. Gregers. That’s what I think too, but once he’s gone in for that kind of thing—
Gina. Surely you can understand that Ekdal isn’t like any of your ordinary photographers, Mr. Werle.]
Gina’s class background probably makes it impossible for her to challenge the assumption that her lazy husband is an extraordinary genius. She does not, however, use the heroization of Hjalmar to support her own sense of identity and importance. Brought up to be self-effacing and fatalistic, Gina underestimates her own worth. Although she knows that she is good for Hjalmar, she feels entitled to nothing, and so becomes the perfect mate for Hjalmar who feels entitled to everything. Because Gina is not tainted by the ideology of the extraordinary, she is capable of acknowledging others. When Hjalmar drives Hedvig to the depths of despair, Gina is the one who screams to him to look at the child: [Hjalmar. Don’t come near me, Hedvig! Go far away! I can’t bear the sight of you. Oh, those eyes—! Goodbye. Hedvig (clinging to him and screaming loudly). No! No! Don’t leave me!
Gina (shouting) Look at the child, Ekdal! Look at the child!
Hjalmar. I won’t! I can’t! I must get out, away from all this! (He tears himself away from Hedvig and exits through the hall door.)]
Finally, Ibsen’s deliberate foregrounding of work, particularly housework, is also a metatheatrical statement. It tells us that the last thing Ibsen wants to write is grand tragedy, whether classical or romantic. We cannot imagine Doña Sol in Hernani dusting and sweeping, and a well-placed offer of coffee and sandwiches would hardly make Phaedra forget all about Hippolytus. In a letter from 1884, Ibsen writes that The Wild Duck represents something new in his work. The challenging juxtaposition of the deadly serious and the utterly ridiculous that is so characteristic of The Wild Duck was new in Ibsen’s work in 1884. Late in life, he complained about the tendency to turn The Wild Duck into a farce, and insisted on the double nature of the play: “‘Det skal være Tragi-komedie,’ sagde han, ‘ellers bliver Hedvigs Død uforstaaelig’” (It
should be tragicomedy, he said, otherwise Hedvig’s death becomes incomprehensible).
In my view, Ibsen’s turn towards the everyday in The Wild Duck takes the form of a rejection of all the usual theatrical forms: comedy, melodrama, and tragedy. Turning towards the everyday means trying to treat all his characters (not just the high, as in tragedy, and not just the low, as in comedy) with equal respect and attention. Of course, Hedvig’s destiny is more tragic, and she is infinitely more touching than anyone else in the play. Her youth, her innocence, and her tragic end do not turn her into tragic heroine on the classical scheme (there is no fall, there is no recognition), but she is nevertheless very much like Cordelia. Is Cordelia a tragic heroine? Is King Lear a tragedy? Is The Wild Duck Ibsen’s Lear? These things cannot be settled here. What remains true is that The Wild Duck unsettles traditional genre schemes and blocks identification, which is another reason (in addition to the quest for the meaning of the wild duck) why it is so difficult to interpret.
“LANGUAGE,
Strange Talk: Dogs, Lofts, and Criteria
In act 2, Gregers visits the Ekdals for the first time, and sees the loft with the wild duck sleeping in her basket. Old Ekdal tells him that when the duck was winged by Gregers’s father, it plunged to the bottom to die as ducks do, but that Old Werle’s exceptionally good dog plunged after it and brought it to the surface. A little later on, Gregers says that he hates his own name, and that he does not know what to do with himself in the world anymore:
[Hjalmar (laughs). Ha! ha! if you weren’t Gregers Werle, what would you like to be?
Gregers. If I could choose, I’d most of all like to be a clever dog.
Gina. A dog!
Hedvig (involuntarily). Oh, no!
Gregers. Yes, a really excessively clever dog, the sort that goes to the bottom after wild ducks when they dive down and bite on to the seaweed in the mud.
Hjalmar. No, really, Gregers,—I don’t understand a word of all this.]
Of course Gregers does not want to be just any dog. Only a really extraordinary dog will do. And of course he is
speaking in metaphors. To him, a dog is not a dog, just like a duck is not a duck. They are both symbols of something else. Here he is presumably trying to say some- thing about “rescuing those wounded by life.” Translated thus, his project sounds as rhetorically hollow as Hjalmar’s wish to “redde den skibbrudne mand” (save the shipwrecked man), by which he means restoring his father’s good name. But Hjalmar’s metaphor is quite different. Old Ekdal is not a shipwrecked sailor, but he is a broken man. Hjalmar’s metaphor is exaggerated, excessive, unconvincing, but it is not particularly mysterious. Gregers’s metaphors, however, are so obscure as to become, at least in the minds of many critics, deep symbols. The alternative is to wonder whether they mean anything at all. Gina and Hedvig have no experience with people who speak in riddles. When Gregers has left, they puzzle over his words:
[Gina (gazing into space, her sewing in her lap). Wasn’t that strange talk, that he really wanted to be a dog?
Hedvig. I’ll tell you one thing, mother,—I think he meant something different by that.
Gina. What would that be?
Hedvig. I don’t know, but it was as if he meant something different from what he said—all the time.
“LANGUAGE,
Gina. Do you really think so? Yes, it was certainly strange.] The word “underlig” (strange, odd, mysterious), here used by Gina, is also used by Hedvig to comment on things she does not understand, including strange uses of language, particularly uses in which words do not mean what they say: “De kaldte ham ‘den flyvendes Hollænderen.’ Og det er underligt; for det var ikke nogen Hollænder,” she says of the old sea-captain whose things have been left in the loft (They called him “the flying Dutchman.” And that’s strange, because he wasn’t a Dutch man).
Hedvig manages more clearly than anyone else to expose Gregers’s bizarrely symbolic language. It would be easy to leap to the conclusion that Hedvig is Gregers’s polar opposite. Yet Ibsen also makes her share something with Gregers. It turns out that they both use the phrase “havsens bund” (the bottom of the sea), and Hedvig reveals that she sometimes thinks of the loft in that way. While not being outlandish, this expression, with its old-fashioned genitive case, has poetic and fairy-tale like overtones. (There is a Norwegian fairy tale about a mill that churns and churns at the bottom of the sea, for example.) Hedvig’s poetic talents, her love for the loft, her willingness to give it a beautiful name makes her feel a kind of community with Gregers when he uses the very same words. Yet in this case, the same words are used very differently. Hedvig can be poetic without losing touch with the everyday, while Gregers cannot. (Poetic language is not the opposite of ordinary language.) This becomes evident at the very end of their bonding over “havsens bund”:
[Hedvig. I always think that the whole room and everything is called “the bottom of the sea.” But that’s just silly.
Gregers. You shouldn’t say that.
Hedvig. Yes, because it’s only a loft.
Gregers (looking steadily at her). Are you so sure of that?
Hedvig (astonished). That it’s a loft!
Gregers. Yes. Do you know that for certain?
Hedvig (says nothing and looks at him, open-mouthed)
When Gregers strays into explicit skepticism, Hedvig can only stare at him. Baffled, she can think of nothing to say. Gregers must seem almost mad to her, yet curiously seductive too. How can she be certain that a loft is a loft? Well, if the question were about its being a loft as opposed to a cellar there would be no mystery. But Gregers is not asking about identity. This is why his question seems so bizarre. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: he has taken a completely ordinary expression (“How can you be certain that it is a loft?”) and placed it outside the language games
where it normally would be at home. In other words: he has taken a question that is usually used about identity and turned it into a question about existence. Because he is not asking about anything we can define with the help of criteria, there can be no answer to Gregers’s question. Hedvig’s baffled silence is the only possible response, unless she were to cast loose from the everyday too. Hedvig thinks the loft could be called “the bottom of the sea.” To her this is a poetic metaphor, an expression of similarity. It has never occurred to her that saying so means that there is no way of telling the difference between the bottom of the sea and the loft. In fact, poetic metaphors rely on differences for their effect. The art of metaphor is the art of seeing likenesses, but it is no art unless the likenesses are unexpected, striking, suddenly illuminating, or thought-provoking. Hedvig’s metaphor is excellent because it is allusive, interesting, and original. If there truly were no way of telling a loft from the bottom of the sea, however, the “bottom of the sea” would not be a metaphor. Exploiting Hedvig’s poetic talents, Gregers takes her metaphor and turns it into outright skepticism. He is, in short, depriving her of criteria. Without criteria, things can be anything. What seems to be a loft could be the bottom of the sea, or a spaceship, for that matter.
By depriving Hedvig of criteria, Gregers leaves her with no way to tell the difference between metaphorical and literal ways of speaking. How will she now be able to tell whether a loft is a loft? Or whether a wild duck is a wild duck? If Gregers thinks he can become a dog, is it not possible that she could become a wild duck? In this fatal conversation Gregers shows Hedvig the way out of the ordinary, and so lays the foundation for her ultimate suicide.
Hedvig dies off stage. She is inside the loft, with the pistol. Through the thin partition wall she overhears the on-stage conversation between Hjalmar and Gregers. Hjalmar hits his most self-pitying rhetorical high, and declares that since he has come to doubt that he is Hedvig’s father, he can no longer trust Hedvig’s love for him. Why would Hedvig love a poor man like him, if she could return to the person Hjalmar now takes to be her real father, the rich Håkon Werle?
[Hjalmar. Suppose the others came, those whose hands are laden with fruit, and they called to the child: “Leave him! We can offer you life—”
Gregers (quickly). Yes, then what?
Hjalmar. If I then asked her: “Hedvig, are you willing to give up life for me?” (laughs scornfully.) Oh yes,—you’d soon hear her answer all right.
(A pistol shot is heard in the loft.)]
Hedvig dies because she takes Hjalmar’s histrionic language literally. He speaks of “life” metaphorically, in the sense of “rich, interesting, socially elevated daily life.” Hedvig thinks he means life itself. Gregers’s contribution to Hedvig’s death is obvious. By depriving her of criteria, he has made her incapable of dealing with metaphors. But his responsibility goes further than this. For Gregers has also been preaching sacrifice to Hedvig. His idea is that an act of sacrifice is far more powerful than words. He has therefore told Hedvig to shoot the wild duck, the thing she cherishes the most in the world, in order to prove to Hjalmar that she loves him.
Gregers here espouses exactly the same theory as Johannes Rosmer at the end of Rosmersholm when he asks Rebecca to kill herself in order to rescue him from his doubt.
In both plays the same words are used. Rosmer asks for vidnesbyrd (testimony, proof, evidence) and so do Hjalmar and Gregers. Hjalmar has just said that he suffers from “denne forfærdelige tvil—; kanske Hedvig aldrig har holdt rigtig ærligt af mig” (this horrible doubt—; perhaps Hedvig has never really and truly loved me). Again we have to remember that Hedvig hears what the two men are saying from inside the loft:
[Gregers. I tell you that you might get proof that your poor, misjudged Hedvig loves you!
Hjalmar. Oh what proof can she give me! I don’t dare to believe in assurances from that quarter.
Gregers. Hedvig surely does not know deceit.
Hjalmar. Oh, Gregers, that is precisely not so certain.]
In both The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm a girl or a woman is asked for testimony or proof in a situation where a man is racked with doubt. In these plays vidnesbyrd turns out not to mean what it usually means, namely a speech act, but an act of self-sacrifice. Whatever Hedvig says will be insufficient, Hjalmar claims. When words have come to seem empty, actions must be substituted. A woman must pay with her life for the man to regain his self-confidence and inner peace. Hjalmar’s monstrous narcissism makes him accept the idea of Hedvig’s sacrificing the duck for his sake with alacrity, but Hjalmar is no Rosmer. Where Rosmer is desperately serious, Hjalmar’s skeptical crisis is mostly sham. He is theatricalizing himself, and would surely get over his doubts in a few days whatever Hedvig does. It is significant, therefore, that it is Gregers, the skeptical idealist, who introduces the idea of the ordeal, of self-sacrifice as testimony of love. It is Gregers, not Hjalmar, who has lost faith in words, which is another way of saying that he is disappointed with criteria, and therefore puts his faith in action. It is as if he thinks
that he can conjure forth the transcendental reality he always dreams of by making someone else commit an act of sacrifice. Hjalmar’s problem is different, but equally death-dealing. If Gregers constantly gives the impression that he means more than he says, Hjalmar constantly says more than he can manage to mean.
Broken Promises: Hjalmar Ekdal’s Way With Words Hjalmar’s language is taken straight out of nineteenth century romantic and melodramatic prose. As many critics have pointed out, the very name Hjalmar has a grandiose sound to it, reminiscent of early-nineteenth-century Danish national romanticism. It is not for nothing that we learn that Hjalmar in his youth was a popular declaimer of poetry. Ibsen must have been chuckling as he gave Hjalmar lines such as these: “(dystert): Gregers, —jeg vil gå! Når en mand har følt skjebnens knusende slag på sit hoved, ser du—”([gloomily]: Gregers, I want to go. When a man has felt the crushing blow of fate on his brow, you see—); “jeg er en mand som bestormes av sorgenes hær” (I am a man besieged by the host of sorrows); and “Glad og sorgløs og kviddrende som en liten fugl flagrer hun ind i livets evige nat” (Happy and carefree, singing like a little bird, she flutters into life’s eternal night).
It is difficult to imagine that nineteenth-century actors would manage to speak lines like these without striking what was then considered the appropriate melodramatic poses. Yet that was precisely what Ibsen wanted to avoid. In a letter to theater director Schroeder at Christiania Theater, dated 14 November 1884, Ibsen writes: “Jeg vilde helst ganske være fri for Isachsen, fordi denne altid går og gebærder sig som en underlig skuespiller og ikke som et almindeligt menneske” (I would really prefer to be entirely free of Isachsen, since he always goes around gesticulating like a strange actor and not like an ordinary human being). Ibsen’s contrast between a “strange actor” and an “ordinary human being” could not be more striking.
Right from the start Ibsen protested against the temptation to turn Hjalmar Ekdal into a buffoon. In the same letter he is quite explicit:
[This part [Hjalmar] must absolutely not be acted with anything like parody in the expression; nor with the slightest trace of awareness in the actor that there is any thing at all comic in his utterances. He has this heartwinning quality in his voice, Relling says, and that needs above all to be maintained. His sensitivity is honest, his melancholy beautiful in form; not the
slightest touch of affectation.] Hjalmar’s invocation of God just after Hedvig’s death, which Ibsen, in his stage directions, provides with the kind of gestures one might expect from a melodramatic actor, exemplifies the point: [Hjalmar. And I drove her from me like an animal! And then she crept terrified into the loft and died for love of me. (sobbing.) Never be able to make it up to her! Never be able to tell her—! (clenches his fists and cries to heaven:) Oh, you up there—!—If you exist—! Why hast Thou done this to me?]
Ibsen’s letter tells us to believe that Hjalmar honestly has these feelings, he is not affected, there is something heartwarming about him. Let us furthermore assume that the actor playing the part knows how to convey this. Why do we still feel that there is something theatrical and morally wrong about Hjalmar’s behavior? The obvious answer, namely that Hjalmar can be understood as a straightforward case of Diderotian theatricality, does not work. For Ibsen tells us that Hjalmar’s behavior is not calculated, that he does not strike these poses simply in order to impress his audience. There is nothing in the scene itself, either, to produce that impression. Peculiarly enough, then, Hjalmar’s theatricality is not self-conscious. We have to look at it from a different angle.
The problem is first of all that his feelings do not last, as Dr. Relling points out at the very end of the play: “Vi skal snakkes ved når det første græsset er visnet på hendes grav. Da kan De få høre ham gulpe op om ‘det fra faderhjertet for tidlig frarevne barn’” (We can discuss it again when the first grass has withered on her grave. Then you’ll hear him regurgitate phrases about “the child so untimely torn from her father’s heart”). Hjalmar could never sustain the tone he uses here for more than about five minutes. Here, for example, shaking his fist at God, he behaves like Job, or an Old Testament prophet. The tone and gestures promises a grandeur and a depth that Hjalmar simply cannot provide. This is crucial. The fact that his language constantly makes promises the man cannot keep is the key to Hjalmar’s theatricality. This has nothing to do with Hjalmar’s subjective intentions, and everything to do with the way he fails to live up to the meaning of his words. Hjalmar’s most fundamental psychic structure must be disavowal, which here means the capacity not to notice this, and so not to notice that he will never be a prophet or a great inventor or even a good father.
Hjalmar’s narcissism surely exacts all this self-inflation in compensation for the steep social fall he has experienced. But the effect on Hedvig is disastrous, for
she grows up in a household where her father’s grandiose phrases are invariably followed by huge letdowns. Hjalmar’s language always promises more than it can keep. This point is established right at the beginning of act 2, in the very first interaction between Hjalmar and Hedvig. The scene, which I am going to quote at length because it is so important, shows us what is wrong with Hjalmar’s language. The poignancy, sadness, and horror of it tell us how we are supposed to feel about it. Here, then, we are right at the ethical, emotional, and philosophical center of The Wild Duck.
Gina and Hedvig are alone at home, waiting for Hjalmar to return from the splendid dinner party at Håkon Werle’s house. Hedvig says to her mother, “Jeg glæder mig så umådelig til at far skal komme hjem. For han lovte at han skulde be’ fru Sørby om noget godt til mig” (I’m looking so immensely forward to father coming home. He promised he’d ask Mrs Sørbye for something nice to eat for me) We also learn that Gina and Hedvig have skimped on dinner in order to save
money, and Hedvig confesses to feeling a little hungry. When Hjalmar arrives, Hedvig waits patiently for a long time. But in the end she cannot bear it any longer:
[Hedvig (after a moment, tugs at his jacket). Father!
Hjalmar. Well, what is it?
Hedvig. Oh, you know what it is.
Hjalmar. No, I really don’t.
Hedvig (laughing and whimpering). Oh father, you mustn’t torment me any longer!
Hjalmar. But what is it then?
Hedvig (shaking him). Oh, stop it! Just give it to me, father. You know, all the nice things you promised me.
Hjalmar. Oh—no! How could I forget!
Hedvig. Oh, you just want to fool me, father! You ought to be ashamed! Where have you put them?
Hjalmar. No, I really did forget. But wait a minute! I have something else for you, Hedvig. (Walks across and searches in his coat pockets.)
Hedvig (jumping and clapping her hands) Oh, mother, mother!
Gina. You see, if you just are patient, then—
Hjalmar (with a piece of paper) Look, here it is.
Hedvig. That ? That’s just a piece of paper.
Hjalmar. It is the bill of fare, you see, the whole bill of fare. Here it says “Menu.” That means bill of fare.
Hedvig. Haven’t you got anything else?
Hjalmar. I told you I forgot the other things. But take my word for it: all that sweet stuff isn’t really much fun. Go and sit at the table now and read the menu, then I’ll tell you afterwards what the different courses taste like. There you are, Hedvig.
Hedvig. Thanks.
(She sits down, but doesn’t read; Gina makes a sign to her, Hjalmar notices.)
Hjalmar (pacing the floor). It really is incredible, all the things a breadwinner has to think about, and if one forgets the slightest little thing,—at once there are sour faces. Well, one gets used to that, too. (stops by the stove, by old Ekdal.) Have you looked in there tonight, father?]
Discussing the wild duck with his father, Hjalmar forgets all about Hedvig, who never reads the menu (just a few minutes earlier, incidentally, she was told that she must not read at night, since it will damage her weak eyes), but who soon comes to offer him beer to cheer him up.
“LANGUAGE,
Hjalmar hugs her, Hedvig sheds tears of joy, and calls him her kind father, and Hjalmar replies: “Nej, kald mig ikke så. Der har jeg siddet og ta’t for mig ved den rige mands bord,—siddet og svælget ved det bugnende taffel—! Og så kunde jeg endda—!” (No, don’t call me that. There I sat, helping myself at the rich man’s table,—gorging myself at the groaning banquet—! And still I could—! Here, for once, Hjalmar goes straight to the heart of the matter, which is, precisely, whether he deserves to be called “snille far” (kind father).
That this scene is literally one of a broken promise makes the point abundantly clear: Hjalmar’s theatricality can be defined as the constant production of empty language, of language that cannot keep the promises of meaning it makes. There are, then, two kinds of empty language in The Wild Duck: Gregers’s obscurely metaphysical formulations, and Hjalmar’s histrionic exaggerations. The parallel between them is made quite explicit by the fact that Hedvig reacts in exactly the same way to both men. Here, when Hjalmar offers her words for food, she replies: “Det er jo bare et papir” (It’s just a piece of paper), just as when Gregers talks to her about the loft, and she says: “det er jo bare et loft” (it’s just a loft). In both cases, Hedvig is struggling to hang on to criteria, to the idea that words can be used in meaningful ways, to the idea that it is possible to mean what one says and say what one means. She would like a loft to be a loft, and a piece of paper to be a piece of paper, not because she is a closet positivist, but because she is a poet at heart. As we have seen, if criteria disappear, nothing can be defined as different from anything else, and that makes metaphors impossible. But even more crucially, without criteria, words lose their meaning. If loft and paper can go that way, so can more crucial words, such as father, daughter, and, ultimately, love.
If Hedvig is driven by her desperate need to hang on to criteria (another way of saying that she needs language to make sense, that she needs language to be ordinary ), it explains why she is so reluctant to believe that Hjalmar has forgotten all about his promise. For Hedvig’s absolute faith in her father in this scene is puzzling, to say the least. She has lived with Hjalmar for almost fourteen years. This is surely not the first time he has forgotten a promise, yet her behavior throughout the scene shows that she will not even let herself think that he might be unfaithful to his words. She thinks he is joking when he says he has forgotten her treat, even though he has already said so several times. The sweet, excited jumping and clapping of hands bear the mark of disavowal. Hedvig is about to turn fourteen, not eight. Isn’t she just a little too old
to behave in this way? Does she really believe in a lastminute surprise at her age and at this point? In her mind she surely does. But in her heart?
Hedvig’s constant attempts to flatter and please her moody father by showering him with compliments about his hair and looks, by running to get him beer and sandwiches, show that she knows very well what he is like. Yet she has steadfastly refused to learn that her father’s words usually do not mean what they say, because it would make it impossible for her to love him as a daughter should, and if she cannot love him, she has no other ground of existence. “What is normative is exactly ordinary use itself” (Cavell 21). If words lose their meaning, if language loses touch with the everyday, there is no other ground to fall back on. “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language,” Wittgenstein writes. Because language use is at once the practice and the ground of all human meaning, this is not just a linguistic, but an existential disaster. The Wild Duck, then, is specifically about Hedvig’s struggle to uphold the meaning of the words “daughter” and “father,” and Hjalmar’s betrayal of that struggle.
But there is more. Hjalmar gives Hedvig words instead of food, and expects her to be as delighted with the one as with the other. This brings us back to our discussion of metaphors. Everything conspires to undermine Hedvig’s faith in words. The words he gives her, moreover, are of a particular kind, namely a bill of fare, a menu, not of the kind one gets in restaurants, but of the kind one gets at a banquet or private dinner. Such a menu is itself a promise. The promise to Hjalmar was kept: he has eaten all the food listed on the menu. To hand the menu to Hedvig in this situation, however, is simultaneously to make and break the menu’s promise. This is a perfect allegory of Hjalmar’s way with words. Hjalmar, who is a good-natured fellow, obscurely feels that there is something wrong with his gesture. To make up for it, he makes another promise: if she will read the menu, he will describe how the food tastes. Of course he never does. To cap it all, he tells her to “believe him at his word.” The irony of it! Except that Hedvig cannot afford to discover the meaning of the word “irony,” for if she does, her faith in her father will not survive.
Finally, Hjalmar will not let Hedvig feel her own disappointment. He instantly gets cross with her and invokes his role as the breadwinner in the family. But this act opens
with a scene where Gina counts the money she earned from taking photographs that day. At this point the audience already suspects that Hjalmar is not much of a breadwinner. Hedvig, however, knows that he is not. Again she is confronted with words empty of meaning, and again she must pretend that she does not notice. For Hedvig, Hjalmar simply must mean what he says, or she will not know what the word “father” means anymore.
Hedvig is exposed to two different kinds of attack on meaning. Gregers deprives her of criteria by removing words from their everyday context, and making even simple questions quite unanswerable. But Hjalmar also deprives her of criteria by constantly using words in ways he cannot mean. If Hedvig is to survive, she needs to love her father. To love him is to believe him at his word. So she must make herself take everything Hjalmar says literally. Then she will have to bear her disappointment, but that is better than not to be the daughter of a loving father. Hedvig’s final, desperate gesture is caused by Hjalmar’s rejection. She cannot live except as a loving daughter, and she cannot bear to hear that her beloved father knows her—knows her love—no better than to think that she would betray him for the kind of life money can buy. Hedvig dies because she takes his talk about her “life” literally. But, ironically, if she were not so deeply identified by her need to believe in Hjalmar, she would have known that he could not possibly mean what he was saying about her. She would have understood his metaphor as well as the fact that there is no need to take any of this verbiage very seriously. But if she let herself know that, Hjalmar would no longer be the father she needs and loves. And she is just a little girl. So she has to make a choice: refuse to understand metaphors, or become cynical, knowing, lost to love. (This sounds like a good description of Dr. Relling.)
“All her words are words of love; to love is all she knows how to do,” Stanley Cavell writes of Cordelia. “That is her problem, and at the cause of the tragedy of King Lear.” Hedvig is a modern Cordelia. All her words are love, and her death too, for Hedvig dies to show Hjamar what love means. Every time I get to the bit where Hjalmar says, “Der er denne forfærdelige tvil—; kanske Hedvig aldrig har holdt rigtig ærligt af mig” (There is this horrible doubt—; perhaps Hedvig has never really and truly loved me), and Gregers eagerly replies, “Det kunde du dog muligens få vidnesbyrd om” (But you might very well get proof that she does), the same pity and the same fear grip me. Hedvig does what Gregers has been telling her to do, and sacrifices the dearest thing she has for her father, except that he did not mean it that way. She takes Hjalmar at his word, and gives up her life for him, and of course he never
meant it that way either. By her death, Hedvig shows them how to mean what they say. They will not heed her lesson.
TORIL MOI is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, English, Theater Studies, Philosophy, and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Duke University.Toril Moi grew up in the countryside in the south-west of Norway, and was educated at the University of Bergen. From 1979 to 1989 she lived mostly in Oxford, UK, and since 1989 she has been a resident of North Carolina. As an academic, she writes on feminism, literary theory, ordinary language philosophy and literature. Her first book, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985) has been translated into fifteen languages. Her 1994 book Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman has been translated into five languages, and a new 2nd edition was published in 2008. Her book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism won the MLA’s award for best book in comparative literary studies for 2007. Her most recent book on feminist theory is Sex, Gender and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman (2005).
Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal.
KATIE BROAD (Miss Pettersen). Broadway: TFANA debut! Credits include: Tony-nominated An Enemy of the People (Circle in the Square), Strategic Love Play (Audible Theater), Oblivion (Westport Country Playhouse), Karen O’s Stop the Virgens (St. Ann’s Warehouse, Sydney Opera House), Complicity (New Ohio Theater), Animals & Plants (NY Premiere). Proud alum of Circle in the Square Theatre School and repped by WEG Talent. Massive love and gratitude to their family and Jamesworth. www.katiebroad.com
MELANIE FIELD (Gina Ekdal). TV: “A League of Their Own” (Amazon), “American Horror Stories” (Hulu), “Heathers” (Paramount), “Florida Girls” (POP TV), “The Angel of Darkness” (TNT), “Shrill” (Hulu), “You” (Netflix), “Killing It” (Peacock). Theater: Sonya in Uncle Vanya (Berkeley Repertory Theatre & Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington DC); Significant Other (Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles). Broadway: The Phantom of the Opera, Evita . National Tour: Wicked . Proud graduate of NYU and Yale School of Drama. For my Kitty Girl and Mr. Wells.
ALEXANDER HURT (Gregers Werle) recently starred in the lead role in Larry Fessenden’s film Blackout and was also recently seen in Maria Schrader’s film She Said. In television, he was a regular in the hit Netflix series “Bonding.” Other TV credits include “Homeland,” “Super Pumped,” “Billions,” “Law & Order: SVU,” and “The Good Fight.” He was nominated for an Emmy for Lead Actor in a Digital Drama Series for “The Rehearsal.” Alexander has been a mainstay on the NY stage. Most recently, he played Alexander Litvinenko on Broadway in Peter Morgan’s Patriots opposite Michael Stuhlbarg and starred off-Broadway in Scenes from a Marriage directed by Ivo Van Hove, Hamish Linklater’s The Whirligig, Placebo directed by Daniel Aukin, Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love directed by Michael Mayer, and Continuity directed by Rachel Chavkin.
Katie Broad as Miss Pettersen and Mahira Kakkar as Mrs Sørby. Photos by Hollis King.
MAHIRA KAKKAR (Mrs Sørby) is thrilled to be back at TFANA, where she was previously in The Winter’s Tale. Mahira is an award-winning actor and a writer. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, Mahira has written for publications in India and the US. As an actor: Broadway: Life of Pi. Off Broadway: Waterwell, LCT3, Primary Stages, Atlantic, NYSF, Ripe Time, Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick, NAATCO. Regional: Huntington Theatre, Old Globe, Denver Center, OSF, Baltimore Center Stage, Hartford Stage, McCarter and others. Film and TV: “Manifest,” “A Suitable Boy,” Hank and Asha, (Slamdance Best Actress award), Sweet Refuge, “Law and Order: CI,” “New Amsterdam,” and others. www.mahirakakkar.com
DAVID PATRICK KELLY (Old Ekdal) has appeared in films by Walter Hill, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders and Clint Eastwood. Onstage he has appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Gogol, Euripides, Buchner, Pirandello, Moliere, Brecht and Ibsen, directed by Richard Foreman, Nicholas Hytner and Karin Coonrod. He was awarded an Obie for Sustained Excellence.
MAAIKE LAANSTRA-CORN (Hedvig) is a New York City-based actor. Recent credits include: Grief Camp (Atlantic Theater), Homofermenters (ARS NOVA ANTfest), When The Other Mary Celeste Sank (WP Theater), Joan of Arc in a Supermarket in California (The Tank), Button Lake Band Camp (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks), and Ms. Lily (Clubbed Thumb Winterworks). BA: Brown University, @_mcorn
TRACIE LANE (Understudy for Miss Pettersen) . TFANA debut. Regional : Peterborough Players (Margot in D ial M for Murder , Gretchen in B oeing B oeing ). Utah Shakespeare Festival: 3 Seasons (Hermione in T he Winter’s Tale , Annabella/ Pamela/Margaret in T he 39 Steps , Joan la Pucelle in Henry VI Pt. 1 ). Asolo Repertory Theatre (Milady de Winter in T he T hree Musketeers ). Orlando Shakes (Vanda in Venus in Fur ). A number of seasons at the American Shakespeare Center and Houston Shakespeare Festival. Off-Broadway: Play On! Festival at Classic Stage Company (Elizabeth/Exeter/Rutland in Henry VI Pt. 3 ). Film /TV: "The Good Fight." Juilliard MFA. Proud member of AEA.
Robert Stanton as Håkon Werle and Bobby Plasencia as Mr Flor. Photos by Hollis King.
BOBBY PLASENCIA (Mr Flor) is making his Theatre for a New Audience debut. Stage: La Ruta (Working Theater), American Jornalero (INTAR), Luz (LaMama), Julius Caesar (Drilling Company), In her Bones (FACCS), Somewhere Over The Border (Syracuse Stage, Geva Theater, City Theatre, People’s Light), American Mariachi (Goodman Theater, Dallas Theater Center, Denver Center, Old Globe, Alabama Shakes, Cleveland Playhouse, Two River Theater), Recent Alien Abductions (Humana Fest), Water & Power (San Diego Rep, Craig Noel Award), Vesuvius (South Coast Rep), Blood Wedding (La Jolla Playhouse), Down Past Passyunk (Interact Theater), The Tempest , Twelfth Night , and A Midsummer Night's Dream (ISCLA, Los Angeles), Water & Power (Understudy, Mark Taper Forum). Film & TV: “House of Cards,” “General Hospital,” Fidel , Maria Full of Grace. MFA NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
MATTHEW SALDÍVAR (Relling/Captain Balle). TFANA: The Merchant of Venice (Edinburgh, Scotland), Julius Caesar. BROADWAY: Junk, Act One (LCT), Peter and the Starcatcher, A Streetcar Named Desire, Saint Joan, Bernhardt/Hamlet, Honeymoon in Vegas, Grease, The Wedding Singer. Other productions include: MTC, Classic Stage Company, Long Wharf, The Public Theater, Williamstown, NY Shakespeare Festival, Blue Light, Atlantic, NYTW, Shakespeare Theater Company, New World Stages, Primary Stages, Hartford Stage, Kennedy Center, Pittsburgh CLO, Bay Street, 2nd Stage, Chautauqua, City Center, Signature Theater NYC, Mark Taper Forum, 1st National tour LCT’s South Pacific , 6 productions for The Guthrie Theater. Recent TV: “Dying for Sex.” MA/BA Middlebury College, MFA NYU.
ALEXANDER SOVRONSKY (Jensen /Music Director) A NYC based actor/multi-instrumentalist and composer, Alexander last appeared in TFANA's 2009 production of Othello directed by Arin Arbus. Other NYC theatre credits include Cyrano de Bergerac (Broadway starring Kevin Kline); Romeo & Juliet, Mother of the Maid (The Public starring Glenn Close); Women Beware Women, Volpone (Red Bull); Bottom of the World (Atlantic); Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Marat/Sade, King Lear (Classical Theatre of Harlem). Regional credits include Arena Stage, Barrington Stage, Seattle Rep, Hartford Stage, KC Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare & Co, Denver Center, Milwaukee Rep, American Shakespeare Center, and many others. For a good time, check out @Alexander.Sovronsky and www.AlexanderSovronsky.com
ROBERT STANTON (Håkon Werle). TFANA: The Killer. Broadway: includes Uncle Vanya, Ink, Saint Joan, A Free Man of Color, Mary Stuart, The Coast of Utopia. Off-Broadway: two-dozen credits include Love Child (written/performed with Daniel Jenkins), All in the Timing (Obie Award). Off-Off-Broadway: The Gold Room . Extensive regional credits include this year’s world premieres, Millions (Alliance) and The Thing About Jellyfish (Berkeley Rep); STC: The Critic & The Real Inspector Hound (Emery Battis Award), Strange Interlude. Films: many, from A League of Their Own to Jason Bourne. Recent television: “Your Friends and Neighbors,” “Blue Bloods,” “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin,” “Mr. Mercedes.”
NICK WESTRATE (Hjalmar Ekdal). Broadway: Bernhardt/Hamlet, Casa Valentina, A Moon for the Misbegotten. OffBroadway: Barrow Street, Public, NYTW, Transport Group, CSC. Recently: Frankenstein in FRANKENSTEIN (STC) and Prior Walter in Angels in America for Jánosz Száz (Arena: Helen Hayes Best Ensemble, Nom. Best Actor). Select TV: Robert Townsend on "Turn: Washington’s Spies” (AMC), Todd Haynes’ “Mildred Pierce” (HBO), Bruno Barreto’s “The American Guest” (HBO), and “Manhunt” (AppleTV). Film: American Insurrection and Jonathan Demme’s Ricki & the Flash opposite Meryl Streep. He's a Drama Desk Award Winner, NYTW Usual Suspect, a graduate of Juilliard, and the co-founder, director, and designer of The Streetcar Project. www.thestreetcarproject.com
DAVID ELDRIDGE (Writer). New York: Broadway: Festen (Music Box Theatre). International: Beginning, Middle, End, Market Boy (National Theatre); Holy Warriors (Shakespeare’s Globe); In Basildon, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness (Royal Court); Under the Blue Sky (Royal Court & Duke of York’s Theatre, West End); The Stock Da’wa, Falling (Hampstead Theatre); The Knot of the Heart (Almeida Theatre); Summer Begins (Donmar Warehouse). Adaptations: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Chichester Festival Theatre); Miss Julie, The Lady from the Sea (Royal Exchange, Manchester); John Gabriel Borkman, The Wild Duck (Donmar Warehouse); Festen (Almeida, Lyric Theatre West End). TV: “The Scandalous Lady W” (BBC2), “Our Hidden Lives" and "Killers” (BBC4). Awards: Time Out Live Award for Best New Play in West End; Theatregoers Choice Award for Best New Play; Prix Europa for Best European Radio Drama; Off West End Theatre Award for Best New Play.
SIMON GODWIN (Director). Artistic Director of Shakespeare Theatre Company. STC: Uncle Vanya with Hugh Bonneville ; Comedy of Errors; Much Ado About Nothing; Timon of Athens with Kathryn Hunter (co-production, TFANA); King Lear with Patrick Page; Macbeth with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, which also played in Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London. Upcoming: Othello with Wendell Pierce. Associate Director at the National Theatre in London: Man and Superman with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma, Antony and Cleopatra with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, and the film of Romeo and Juliet with Jessie Buckley and Josh O'Connor. Royal Shakespeare Company: Hamlet with Paapa Essiedu. TFANA: Measure for Measure.
ANDREW BOYCE (Scenic Designer). Recent: Legacy of Light (McCarter); Light in the Piazza (Huntington); You Will Get Sick (Steppenwolf). NY credits with New York Theater Workshop, Primary Stages, Lincoln Center, Atlantic Theater Company, Civilians, Roundabout, Vineyard, Julliard, Manhattan Theater Club, among others. Broadway: Dana H. Regional credits with most major regional and LORT theaters across the U.S. Opera and Dance credits with Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Theater of St. Louis, Cincinnati Opera, Opera Omaha, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Boston Lyric Opera, Curtis Opera, among others. Yale School of Drama. Associate Professor of Design at Northwestern. www.andrewboycedesign.com
HEATHER C. FREEDMAN (Costume Designer) is a visual artist and designer for theater, opera, and film. Recent costume design work includes: Uncle Vanya directed by Simon Godwin and co-designed with Susan Hilferty, Berkeley Rep & Shakespeare Theatre Company; Tina Howe’s Where Women Go , world premiere, HERE Arts Center (Henry Hewes nomination: Best Costume Design); Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi , NYU Steinhardt; Newtown Odyssey , a floating opera on and for Newtown Creek co-created by composer Kurt Rohde, writer Dana Spiotta, and artist Marie Lorenz. Broadway credits include Assistant Costume Design for Swept Away and Funny Girl (designer: Susan Hilferty) and Caroline, or Change (designer: Fly Davis). Heather is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and NYU Tisch Design for Stage and Film, where she teaches drawing. She lives in New York City.
STACEY DEROSIER (Lighting Designer). The Last Five Years (Broadway), Well I’ll Let You Go (Regular People), Grangeville (Signature Theatre), Teeth (Playwrights Horizons/NWS), The Counter , The Refuge Plays (Roundabout Theatre), The Welkin (Atlantic Theater), The Animal Kingdom (The Connelly Theater Upstairs), All the Devils Are Here (DR2), The Half-God of Rainfall (NYTW), Uncle Vanya (O’Henry), On Set with Theda Bara (Exponential Festival), Drama Desk Design Award 2025, Audelco Award Obie Design Award 2023, 2018 Lilly Award Daryl Roth Prize.
DARRON L WEST (Sound Designer) is a Tony and Obie award-winning sound designer specializing in new work. Of his 700 career productions spanning theater, dance, and art installations, 220 have been world premieres. His soundscapes have been heard throughout the US and internationally in 15 countries. Additional honors include the Drama Desk, Lortel, Audelco, and Princess Grace Foundation Statue Award among many others. Thirty-year company member designing the productions of Anne Bogart and the SITI company.
JON KNUST (Properties Supervisor) Selected credits include: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadway); Prosperous Fools, Henry IV, We Are Your Robots, Waiting for Godot, Des Moines, The Merchant of Venice, Gnit, The Winter's Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth, About Alice, The Father, and A Doll’s House (TFANA); We Live In Cairo (NYTW); A Bright New Boise, Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, Big Love, and Appropriate (Signature); and Peter and the Starcatcher (tour). Jon got his start in props at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University.
SATELLITE WIGS (Hair & Wig Designers) Satellite Wigs, Inc. is a tale of two Sara(h)s with over 20 individual Broadway credits between them. Sara Donovan and Sarah Levine met as hair and makeup apprentices at The Juilliard School. While working together in television, they formed a wig-making company focused on creating high end wigs, facial hair, and custom pieces for personal, professional theatrical, and cinematic needs.
JACOB GRIGOLIA-ROSENBAUM (Movement and Fight Director) (he/him) (SDC, AEA, SAG/AFTRA) Credits include: Theater: Here Lies Love (Broadway, etc.), Peter and the Starcatcher (Broadway, etc.), Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Broadway, etc.), Cyrano (Broadway), Ghost of John McCain (Soho Playhouse), Robber Bridegroom (Roundabout), Sailor Man (co-creator; NYFringe; Outstanding Play), Old Globe (San Diego): Henry6, Noises Off, Last Goodbye, Huzzah!, Robin Hood!, As You Like It, Othello, R&J, Hamlet . Other Fight Direction for: Disney Cruises, The Public, Williamstown, Asolo, Ogunquit, Les Freres, Prospect Musicals, Mercury Store, the Tank and many others. Film/TV: Peter Pan Live! (NBC/Universal), Dark Was the Night (also creature performer; Caliber/ Image) Education: Yale College (Fencing NCAA Div1).
ANDREW WADE (Resident Voice Director). Broadway: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child Parts One and Two (U.S. Head of Voice and Dialect), King Lear with Glenda Jackson (Voice Coach), Matilda the Musical (Director of Voice) and national tour. Royal Shakespeare Company: Head of Voice (1990-2003). The Public Theater: Director of Voice. NYTW: Othello with Daniel Craig. The Guthrie Theater: since 2002. Teaching: Juilliard (Adjunct Faculty Drama Division), Stella Adler Studio (Master Teacher Voice and Speech). Film: Shakespeare in Love . Workshops and Lectures: Worldwide. Fellow: Rose Bruford College.
JONATHAN KALB (Dramaturg) is professor of theatre at Hunter College, CUNY and is TFANA’s resident dramaturg. The author of five books on theatre, he has worked for more than three decades as a theatre scholar, critic, journalist and dramaturg. He has twice won The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has also won the George Freedley Award for an outstanding theatre book from the Theatre Library Association. He often writes about theatre on his TheaterMatters blog at jonathankalb.com
SHANE SCHNETZLER (Production Stage Manager)(he/him). TFANA: Soho Rep’s Fairview, Prosperous Fools, Macbeth (An Undoing), Waiting for Godot, Orpheus Descending, Des Moines, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Why?, Julius Caesar, The Emperor, Heart/Box, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tamburlaine, Fiasco’s Cymbeline. Off-Broadway: All the World’s a Stage, Fish, Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company); Fatherland (City Center); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic) ; Noura, This Flat Earth, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Familiar (Playwrights Horizons); Napoli, Brooklyn, Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors (NYSF).
MICHELLE LAUREN TUITE (Assistant Stage Manager). Broadway/NYC: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; Borderline: A New Musical With Personality; #DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment. Regional: Dancing in the Street (Transcendence Theatre Company); Next to Normal, Doubt, Man of La Mancha, Grounded (Westport Country Playhouse); BeautifulStar (Triad Stage); Our Town (Long Wharf Theatre); Memphis and La Cage Aux Folles (Ivoryton Playhouse).
BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing arts organizations and cultural institutions. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, Soho Rep, National Sawdust, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, PEN America, StoryCorps, Symphony Space, the Fisher Center at Bard, Peak Performances, Irish Arts Center, the Merce Cunningham Trust, the Onassis Foundation, Taylor Mac, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, PlayCo and more.
ACTORS' EQUITY ASSOCIATION (“Equity”) , founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 50,000 actors and stage managers. Equity seeks to foster the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages and working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an international organization of performing arts unions. #EquityWorks
Associate Director............................................Britt Berke
Music Director..................................Alexander Sovronsky
Intimacy Coordinator..............Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum
Associate Scenic Designer..............................Alayna Klein
Associate Lighting Designer...........................Tyler Dubuc
Associate Sound Designer............................Ryan M. Hall
Assistant Costume Designer...........................Jack Wallace
Assistant Technical Director......................Cory Asinofsky
Casting Assistants...........Emma Paoletti and Will DeVary
Ibsen Consultant.............................................Paul Walsh
Photography Consultants....Mark Scully and France Osterman
Sound Board Operator....................................Maggie Schlusser
Production Audio.............................................Hayden Bearden
Audio Support.................................................Geoff Grimwood
Deck/Props Carpenter.......................Tristan Viner-Brown
Carpetners...........................Kevin Bickwermert, Jules Conlon, Mark D'Agostino, Helen Hylton, Frann Mccrann, Maria Ossino, Tobias Segal, Mavis Wesley, Jesse Mattes
Lightboard Programmer & Operator.......Paul T. Kennedy
Production Assistants.....Genevieve Dornemann, Colleen Rooney, Jack Meister-Lopez, Kelley Lynne Moncrief
Five OHM Production Support....Hayden Bearden, Rudy Bearden, Ryan Hall, Pedro Lima, Daniel Santamaria
Production Electrician..................................Michael Cahill
Electricians........................Behnam Ardebili, Erin Bulman, Elizabeth Camacho, Rhylke Caputo, Robert Cott, Elianna Kruskal, Ciara McAloon, Tony Mulanix, Rodney Perez, Aaliyah Stewart, Omar Swaray, Kiva Wise
Costume Supervisor...............................Amanda Roberge Wardrobe Supervisor.................................Clara Gumbart
Costume Support.................................Adrianne Williams
Dresser.............................................................Maia Soltis
Hair & Wig Supervisor..............................Kristi D’Arrigo
Stitchers...........................Michelle Sesco, Emma Bizzack, Delaney Johnston, Candida Nichols
Scenery Provided by Daedalus Design & Production. Lighting gear provided by Christie Lites. Audio gear provided by Five OHM Productions. Costumes by Bethany Joy Costumes, Lisa Logan, Alexander Zeek, Siam Costumes. Dyeing and distressing by Lindsey Eifert, Brynne OsterBainnson. Custom millinery by Crown Jules. Custom craft work by Aura Meyers. Additional costumes provided by TDF Costume Collection, OSF Costume Rentals, NYU Tisch Design for Stage and Film, Shakespeare Theatre Company. Special thanks to Susan Hilferty, Mark Koss, Maggie Raywood.
The Wild Duck was rehearsed at MARK MORRIS DANCE CENTER.
ARIN ARBUS (Artistic Director). Arbus served as Associate Artistic Director at TFANA for a decade, during which time she directed: Othello, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Doll’s House, The Father, The Skin of Our Teeth (Obie). Upon leaving this post, Arbus served as TFANA’s Resident Director, directing Des Moines, Waiting for Godot, The Merchant of Venice , starring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, also playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Outside TFANA: Deep Blue Sound by Abe Koogler for Clubbed Thumb; The Lehman Trilogy , at Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Guthrie; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune , (Tony Nom for Best Revival) starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon; and Verdi’s La Traviata for Canadian Opera Company (8 Dora nominations), Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Houston Grand Opera.
DOROTHY RYAN (Executive Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003 after a ten-year fundraising career with the 92nd Street Y and Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and also served as company manager and managing leader for several regional opera companies. She is a Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree and was a founding member of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance.
CHLOE KNIGHT (General Manager) is a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s Theater Management program, and recipient of Yale’s 2024 Morris J. Kaplan Prize in Theater Management. Knight has served as Associate Managing Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, assistant to the president of LORT, Co-Managing Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret, Company Manager at Yale Rep, and Management Fellow at Lincoln Center Theater. Before earning her MFA, she held myriad fundraising positions at Page 73, consulting firm Advance NYC, and The Lark.
JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group, the advisory board of the Shakespeare Society and the artistic directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. Awards: 2003 John Houseman Award from The Acting Company, 2004 Gaudium Award from Breukelein Institute, 2019 Obie Lifetime Achievement and TFANA’s 2020 Samuel H. Scripps.
Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz and led by Horowitz until 2025 as Founding Artistic Director, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is a New York home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. It nurtures artists, culture, and community. On September 1, 2025, Arin Arbus succeeded Jeffrey Horowitz as Artistic Director, with Dorothy Ryan appointed as Executive Director.
Artistic Director Arin Arbus
Executive Director Dorothy Ryan
Founding Artistic Director
Jeffrey Horowitz
General Manager Chloe Knight
Director of Institutional Advancement
James J. Lynes
Finance Director Mary Sormeley
Education Director Lindsay Tanner
Director of Marketing & Communications
Eddie Carlson
Facilities Director Rashawn Caldwell
Director of Production Jeff Harris
Technical Director Ellie Engstrom
Associate Director of Development
Sara Billeaux
Artistic Associate Peter Cook
Associate Producer Allison Benko
Company Manager Molly Burdick
Theatre Manager Lawrence Dial
Box Office Manager Allison Byrum
Marketing Manager Angela Renzi
Education Manager Emma Griffone
Coordinator, Administration & Humanities/Studio Programs
Zoe Donovan
New Deal Program Coordinator Zhe Pan
Institutional Giving Associate Madison Wetzell
Finance Associate Harmony Fiori
Development Associate Suzanne Lenz
Development Associate Gavin McKenzie
Facilities Associate Tim Tyson
Archivist Shannon Resser
TFANA Teaching Artists
Matthew Dunivan, Melanie Goodreaux, Albert Iturregui-Elias, Margaret Ivey, Elizabeth London, Erin McCready, Marissa Stewart, Kea Trevett
House Managers
Denise Ivanoff, Jasmine Louis, Regina Pearsall, Nancy Gill Sanchez
Press Representative
Blake Zidell & Associates
Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin
Resident Dramaturg Jonathan Kalb
Resident Voice and Text Director
Andrew Wade
TFANA Council of Scholars
Tanya Pollard, Chair
Jonathan Kalb, Alisa Solomon, Ayanna Thompson
Concessions Sweet Hospitality Group
Legal Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
Accounting: Sax LLP
With Shakespeare as its guide, TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre. TFANA has produced 35 of Shakespeare’s 38-play canon and builds a dialogue spanning centuries between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA is committed to building long-term associations with artists from around the world and supporting the development of plays, translations, and productions through residences, workshops, and commissions through the Merle Debuskey Studio Program. TFANA performs for an audience of all ages and backgrounds; and promotes a vibrant exchange of ideas through its humanities and education programs.
TFANA’s productions have been played nationally, internationally, and on Broadway. In 2001, it became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company. TFANA has also partnered with Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre for The Shakespeare Exchange in a transatlantic partnership: In spring of 2024, TFANA presented the Lyceum’s Macbeth (An Undoing). In January 2025, the Lyceum presented TFANA’s The Merchant of Venice, featuring John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and directed by Arin Arbus.
TFANA created and runs the largest in-depth program to introduce Shakespeare and classic drama in New York City’s public schools. Since its inception in 1984, the program has served more than 140,000 students. TFANA is committed to economic access. In addition to offering selected Pay What You Can Performances, its New Deal Ticket Initiative offers $20 tickets to those age 30 and under and fulltime students of any age for all dates of all its productions.
In 2013, TFANA opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), in the Brooklyn Cultural District. The heart of PSC is its performance space: the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, a uniquely flexible space capable of multiple configurations between stage and audience; as well as the 50-seat Theodore C. Rogers Studio.
TFANA honors the Lenape and Canarsie people, on whose ancestral homeland Polonsky Shakespeare Center is built.
Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs
TFANA’s education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and playwriting with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy and creative development.
A Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky
Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District and a contributor to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn.
Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first New York City theatre built for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s 1965 Vivian Beaumont. The 27,500-square-foot facility is a uniquely flexible performance space. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is a sustainable (green) theatre, with a LEED-NC Silver rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Board Chair
Robert E. Buckholz
Vice Chair
Kathleen C. Walsh
Executive Committee
Alan Beller
Robert E. Buckholz
Constance Christensen
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry M. Loeb
Philip R. Rotner
Kathleen C. Walsh
Josh Weisberg
Members
Arin Arbus
John Berendt*
Bianca Vivion Brooks*
Ben Campbell
Robert Caro*
Jonathan R. Donnellan
Sharon Dunn*
Matthew E. Fishbein
Riccardo Hernandez*
Kathryn Hunter*
Dana Ivey*
Tom Kirdahy*
John Lahr*
Harry J. Lennix*
Catherine Maciariello*
Marie Maignan*
Lindsay H. Mantell*
Audrey Heffernan Meyer*
Alan Polonsky
J.T. Rogers*
Dorothy Ryan
Joseph Samulski*
Doug Steiner
Michael Stranahan
John Douglas Thompson*
John Turturro*
Frederick Wiseman*
*Artistic Council
Emeritus
Francine Ballan
Sally Brody
William H. Burgess III
Caroline Niemczyk
Janet C. Olshansky
Theodore C. Rogers
Mark Rylance*
Daryl D. Smith
Susan Stockel
Monica G.S. Wambold
Jane Wells
CONTRIBUTORS TO THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE’S ANNUAL FUND
May 1,2024 – September 4, 2025
Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. Theatre for a New Audience thanks the following donors for their generous support toward our Annual Campaign. For a list of donors $250 and above, go to www.tfana.org/annualdonors.
PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS
($100,000 and up)
The Bay and Paul Foundations
Alan Beller
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs
Constance Christensen
The Ford Foundation
The Hearst Foundations
Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund at The New York Community Trust
The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation
The Polonsky Foundation
National Endowment for the Humanities
The SHS Foundation
The Shubert Foundation, Inc.
The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc.
LEADING BENEFACTORS
($50,000 and up)
Bloomberg Philanthropies
The Charina Endowment Fund
Deloitte & Touche LLP
The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
The Howard Gilman Foundation, Inc.
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
The Whiting Foundation
MAJOR BENEFACTORS
($20,000 and up)
The Achelis and Bodman Foundation
Arete Foundation
Sally Brody
Ben Campbell and Yiba Ng
The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone
The George Link Jr. Foundation
Agnes Gund
The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust
The Hearst Corporation
Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP
Latham & Watkins LLP
K. Ann McDonald
Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
National Endowment for the Arts/Arts Midwest
New York State Council on the Arts
Caroline Niemczyk
Marcia Riklis
The Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Foundation
Robert and Cynthia Schaffner
The Starry Night Fund
Douglas C. Steiner
The Stockel Family Foundation
Anne and William Tatlock
The White Cedar Fund
SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS
($10,000 and up)
Anonymous (1)
The Arnow Family Fund
Arts Consulting Group
Peggy and Keith Anderson
The Claire Friedlander
Family Foundation
The Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation
Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation
Jill and Jay Bernstein
Natalie and Matthew Bernstein
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Michele and Martin Cohen
M. Salome Galib and Duane McLaughlin
Ashley Garrett and Alan Jones
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Campbell Jackson
The Gladys Krieble
Delmas Foundation
Monica Gerard-Sharp / The GerardSharp Wambold Foundation
The Howard Bayne Fund
JKW Foundation
The J.M. Kaplan Fund
Michael M. Kaiser and John S. Roberts
King & Spalding LLP
Seymour H. Lesser
Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb
McDermott Will & Emery
Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc.
Janet C. Olshansky
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
Anne Prost and Olivier Robert
The Roy Cockrum Foundation
Sarah I. Schieffelin Residuary Trust
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Select Equity Group, Inc
Sidley Austin LLP
The Speyer Family Foundation
Susan Stockel
Tarter Krinsky & Drogin LLP
Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal
Josh and Jackie Weisberg
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY
($5,000 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Axe-Houghton Foundation
Dominique Bravo and Eric Sloan
The Bulova Stetson Fund
Janel Callon
Charney Companies
Jane Cooney
Katharine and Peter Darrow
Jodie and Jonathan Donnellan
Aileen Dresner and Frank R. Drury
Sharon Dunn and Harvey Zirofsky
Jennifer and Steven Eisenstadt
Therese Esperdy and Robert Neborak
Wendy Ettinger
Debra Fine and Martin I. Schneider
Jenny and Jeff Fleishhacker
Roberta Garza
Cynthia Crossen and James Gleick
Debra Goldsmith Robb
Kathy and Steven Guttman
Michael Haggiag
Russ Heldman
Vanderbilt University OLLI Instructor
Nora Wren Kerr and John J. Kerr
Andrea Knutson
Sandy and Eric Krasnoff
Anna and Peter Levin
Litowitz Foundation, Inc.
Diane and William F. Lloyd
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
New York City Council
New York City Tourism Foundation
The Norwegian Consulate General in New York
Estelle Parsons
Richenthal Foundation
Philip and Janet Rotner
Joseph Samulski and Cynthia Hammond
Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Daryl and Joy Smith
Theatre Development Fund
Ayanna Thompson
Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund
The Venable Foundation
Margo and Anthony Viscusi
Anna L. Weissberger Foundation
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE
($2,500 and up)
Anonymous (2)
Elizabeth Beller-Dee and Michael Dee
Nancy Blachman and David desJardins
Lani and Dave Bonifacic
Hilary Brown and Charles Read
Walter Cain and Paulo Ribeiro
Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc
Dennis M. Corrado / The Breukelein Institute
The Barbara Bell Cumming
Charitable Trust
Christine Cumming
DeLaCour Family Foundation
Suzan and Fred Ehrman
Steven Feinsilver
Foley Hoag LLP
Jeffrey Horowitz
Stuart Freedman
Linda Genereux and Timur Galen
Pamela Givner
Lauren Glant and Michael Gillespie
Marion and Daniel Goldberg
Katherine Goldsmith
Karoly and Henry Gutman
Grace Harvey
Thomas Healy and Fred P. Hochberg
Sophia Hughes
The Irwin S. Scherzer Foundation
Maxine Isaacs
Flora and Christoph Kimmich
Kirkland & Ellis Foundation
Cathy and Christopher Lawrence
Lucille Lortel Foundation
Rebecca and Stephen Madsen
Susan Martin and Alan Belzer
Marta Heflin Foundation
Barbara Forster Moore and
Richard Wraxall Moore
Catherine Nyarady and Gabriel Riopel
Ellen Petrino
Riva and Stephen Rosenfield
Dorothy Ryan and John Leitch
Sandra and Steven Schoenbart
Jeremy T. Smith
Laura Speyer and Josef Goodman
Barbara Stimmel
PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE
($1,000 and up)
Anonymous (4)
Actors’ Equity Foundation
Karim Aoun
Jackie and Jacob Baskin
Elizabeth Bass
Deborah Berke and Peter McCann
Nadia Bernstein
Cece and Lee Black
Mary Bockelmann Norris and Floyd Norris
William H. Burgess, III
Deborah Buell and Charles Henry
Joan and Robert Catell
Bonnie and David Covey
Susan Cowie
Jeff Cronin
Robert Currie
Ian Dickson and Reg Holloway
Ev and Lee
Ryan Fanek
Grace Freedman
Mara Goldstein and Ben Saltzman
Anne and Paul Grand
Alba Greco-Garcia and Roger Garcia
Kathleen and Harvey Guion
Laura and Robert Hoguet
The Holiman Hackney Family Fund
Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP
Elizabeth Humes
Denise and Al Hurley
Sally and Alfred Jones
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Kirsten Kern
Fran Kumin
Jessie McClintock Kelly
Susan Kurz Snyder
Michael Lasky
Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins
Marion Leydier and Brooks Perlin
Margaret Lundin
Kathleen Maurer
Jeffrey and Wendy Maurer
John Mauriello
Leslie and Jordan Mayer
Scott C. McDonald and Michael Heyward
Marlene Marko and Loren Skeist
Carol Murray
Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara
Lori and Lee Parks
Annie Paulsen and Albert Garner
Margaret and Carl Pfeiffer
Ponce Bank
Rajika and Anupam Puri
Carol and Michael Reimers
Susan and Peter Restler
David A.J. Richards
Susan and William Rifkin
Paul Rosenberg
Joan H. Ross
Eliza and James Rossman
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Susan Sommer and Stephen A. Warnke
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer
Charitable Trust
Lauren and Jay Springer
Wendy and Tom Stephenson
Danna and Harvey Stone
Kathleen and Michael Stringer
Margaret Sullivan
Sweet Hospitality Group
Brianna Van Kan
Giulia and Marc Weisman
Fran and Barry Weissler
Elena and Louis Werner
Tappan Wilder
Debra Winger and Arliss Howard
Carol Yorke and Gerard Conn
Barbara and Michael Zimmerman
Audrey Zucker
IN HONOR OF
In honor of Robert E. Buckholz
Steven and Jennifer Eisenstadt
Susan and William Rifkin
Barbara and Michael Zimmerman
In honor of Matt Fishbein
Michael Lasky
In honor of Jeffrey Horowitz
Maxine Isaacs
In memory of Barbara Faye
Peavy Howard
Debra Winger and Arliss Howard
In honor of Audrey Meyer
Peggy and Keth Anderson
Deborah Berke and Peter McCann
Pamela Givner
Shauna Holiman and Robert Hackney
Mimi Oka and Jun Makihara
Stacy Schiff and Marc de la Bruyere
Laurie Tisch
In memory of Leonard Polonsky
Marion and Daniel Goldberg
Daniel Polonsky
Marcia Riklis
In memory of Steven Jackson Popkin
Susan Kurz
In honor of Gene Bernstein and Kathleen Walsh
Natalie and Matthew Bernstein
In honor of Kathleen Walsh
Jill and Jay Bernstein
Michele and Martin Cohen
Denise And Al Hurley
Wendy and Jeff Maurer
Leslie and Jordan Mayer
In memory of Ruth Winger
Debra Winger
In honor of Simon Godwin
The Arete Foundation and The Brandt Jackson Foundation
The following companies have contributed through their Matching Gift Programs: If your employer has a matching gift program, please consider making a contribution to Theatre for a New Audience and making your gift go further by participating in your employer’s matching gift program.
Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
Bank of America
The Hearst Corporation
International Business Machines
JP Morgan Chase
Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
May 1,2024 – August 18, 2025
After 46 years of visionary leadership and singular accomplishments in American Theatre—and especially in American productions of Shakespeare— Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience, stepped down on August 31, 2025. The Jeffrey Horowitz Legacy Fund was established to celebrate him as well as well as provide support for Arin Arbus, who took up the mantle as TFANA’s new Artistic Director on September 1, 2025. The resources of Jeffrey Horowitz Legacy Fund will allow Arin to maximize special opportunities and implement her artistic vision. For more information, or to make a gift, please contact James Lynes, Director of Institutional Advancement, at jlynes@tfana.org.
Alan Beller
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Katherine and Gary Bartholomaus
The Jerome and Marlène Brody Foundation
Sally Brody
Marc de la Bruyere
Ben Campbell and Yiba Ng
The Charina Endowment
Constance Christensen
Charles Cunningham
Peter and Katharine Darrow
Jonathan and Jodie Donnellan
Richard Feldman
Matt Fishbein and Gail Stone
Marion and Daniel Goldberg
Norman Green
Gail Hochman
Jeffrey Horowitz
Steven Horowitz
Penny and Thomas Jackson
Michael M. Kaiser and John S. Roberts
Larry and Maria-Luisa Loeb
Catherine Maciariello
Danielle Mowery
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
Mary Beth Peil
Ellen Petrino
The Polonsky Foundation
Anne Prost and Olivier Robert
Dorothy Ryan
Joseph Samulski and Cynthia Hammond
The SHS Foundation
Miriam Schneider
Katherine and Bill Schubart
Eugene Skowronski
Susan Stockel*
Anne and William Tatlock
Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal
Margo and Anthony Viscusi
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
Debra Winger and Arliss Howard
Theatre for a New Audience recognizes with gratitude the following donors to Theatre for a New Audience’s Capital Campaign to support ambitious programming, access to affordable tickets and financial resiliency.
Named funds within the Capital Campaign include the Henry Christensen III Artistic Opportunity Fund, the Audrey H. Meyer New Deal Fund and the Merle Debuskey Studio Fund . Other opportunities include the Completing Shakespeare’s Canon Fund, Capital Reserves funds and support for the design and construction of New Office and Studio Spaces.
To learn more, or to make a gift to the Capital Campaign, please contact James Lynes at jlynes@tfana.org or by calling 646-553-3886.
$1,000,000 AND ABOVE
Mr.◊ and Mrs. Henry Christensen III
Ford Foundation
The Howard Gilman Foundation
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
The Thompson Family Foundation
$250,000-$999,999
Booth Ferris Foundation
Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine
Merle Debuskey◊
Irving Harris Foundation
The Stairway Fund, Audrey Heffernan Meyer and Danny Meyer
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Kathleen Walsh and Gene Bernstein
◊deceased
$100,000–$249,999
Alan Jones and Ashley Garrett
Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr.
Seymour H. Lesser
The Polonsky Foundation
Charlene Magen Weinstein◊
$50,000–$99,999
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Aileen and Frank Drury
Agnes Gund
The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund
New York State Council on the Arts
Abby Pogrebin and David Shapiro
John and Regina Scully Foundation
Marcia T. Thompson◊
$20,000–$49,999
Peggy and Keith Anderson
Elaine and Norman Brodsky
Kathy and Steve Guttman
Rita & Alex Hillman Foundation
Cynthia and Robert Schaffner
Kerri Scharlin and Peter Klosowicz
Daryl and Joy Smith
Susan Stockel
Anne and William Tatlock
Earl D. Weiner
$10,000–$19,999
Diana Bergquist
Sally R. Brody
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
Linda and Jay Lapin
Janet Wallach and Robert Menschel◊
Alessandra and Alan Mnuchin
Anne Prost and Robert Olivier
Allison and Neil Rubler
Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch
Michael Tuch Foundation
Jackie and Josh Weisberg
$5,000–$9,999
Alan Beller
Katharine and Peter Darrow
Bipin and Linda Doshi
Marcus Doshi
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
Susan Schultz and Thomas Faust
Barbara G. Fleischman
Jane Garnett and David Booth
Penny Brandt Jackson and Thomas Jackson
Miriam Katowitz and Arthur Radin
Mary and Howard Kelberg
Kirsten and Peter Kern
Susan Litowitz
Ronay and Richard Menschel
Ann and Conrad Plimpton
Priham Trust/The Green Family
Alejandro Santo Domingo
Marie and Mark Schwartz
Cynthia and Thomas Sculco
Nancy Meyer and Marc N. Weiss
A 2011 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support in perpetuity the 360° Series: Viewfinders as well as the TFANA Council of Scholars and the free TFANA Talks series. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013-2015. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder or the Theatre’s Humanities programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.