Quote of the Day (Isabella Rossellini, on Her ‘Adventurous’ Mom, Ingrid Bergman)

"Everyone was a symbol: the gangster, the femme fatale. Cary Grant always played Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart played Jimmy Stewart. Mother was typecast as the ingenue, but she was very adventurous and wanted to find more ways of making art."— Isabella Rossellini on her mother, Ingrid Bergman, quoted in Julia Llewellyn Smith, “Isabella Rossellini on Ingrid Bergman's Painful Final Days,” The Telegraph (UK), Aug. 25, 2015

Today marks the centennial of the birth of Ingrid Bergman (in the image accompanying this post, with perhaps her most famous movie, Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart). She was, as her daughter matter-of-factly notes above, “very adventurous”—and, to the enduring delight of cinephiles such as myself, she founded every possible way of “making art."

In her very first Hollywood picture, Intermezzo, the Swedish actress refused the urging of producer David O. Selznick that she change her German-sounding last name and fix her teeth. 

(Eventually, as I recounted in a prior post, Selznick realized that he could capture on film her luminous beauty by laying off the heavy makeup—and found himself credited with pioneering a trend toward “natural beauty” onscreen.) 

Her resistance to typecasting was braver than we can imagine now, in an era when actresses such as Luise Rainer, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland had to endure suspensions, litigation and even exile to break out of the creative straitjackets imposed by the studios.

That adventurousness also threatened to end her career at its height, when an extramarital affair with director Robert Rossellini led to a hysterical outcry that might have reached the ultimate in ludicrousness when she was even denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as an “instrument of evil”!

It took six years for the hubbub to die down and Bergman to return to Hollywood in the role that won her a second Oscar, for Anastasia.

Her work, particularly in the 1940s, can hold up with the best of any actress of her time. But Bergman ended up sacrificing much for her art and her desires, including, because of appearances on film and stage sets, time with her children. 

I urge you to read a fine dissection of her last film, Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, by the exceptional blogger Farran Smith Nehme (or, as she’s known in the blogosphere, “Self-Styled Siren”), which examines how her role as a career-first concert pianist inevitably reflected aspects of her own life.

Bergman was ready to try a role in any medium--for instance, taking on the role of Joan of Arc on film, on stage, and even in an opera. As part of a collection of interviews with actors, The Player: A Profile of an Art, Bergman communicated to sister co-authors Lillian and Helen Ross that she even found television “very stimulating”: 

“Television acting combines the best of the theatre and the best of movies. It is another new thing to do and to try. In making a movie, you say a line over and over, and by the time you've said it for the take, you don't remember what it is you're saying. Acting in the theatre, you have to shout, so that people up in the balcony can hear you. But when you do a television play, there are four cameras working at once, and you have both the wonderful intimacy of the screen and the live acting of the stage. In television, I know I have to be calm while everybody else is rushing around, and I love it.”

You can see what Bergman is talking about in her performance in a 1963 TV adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I was lucky enough to view it several years ago at the Paley Center for Media in New York, but you can see it here now, on this YouTube clip. 

It might not be as widely circulated as Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary's, or Murder on the Orient Express (which won her a third Oscar). But, in taking on the female role that, in fearsome complexity, most rivals Hamlet, Bergman demonstrated again her infinite artistry as well as fearlessness. Her sense of the dramatic moment persisted to the end, as she died of breast cancer on her 67th birthday.

Theater Review: Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” from the Roundabout Theatre Co.

The word I associate with the Roundabout Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler is “massacre.” The critics would have it that this gruesome act was perpetrated upon Ibsen’s 1891 drama by director Ian Rickson in collaboration with adaptors Christopher Shinn and Anne-Charlotte Hay. Such thunderous invective was hurled at the play that the Roundabout probably couldn’t bring down the final curtain fast enough two weekends ago.

I’m not sure what was eating these reviewers, for they reacted out of all proportion to what I saw onstage. Am I arguing that this production will forever alter how the Scandinavian playwright’s anti-heroine is viewed? Hardly.

But the media did a major disservice by discouraging theatergoers from a revival that was consistently challenging. Critics have expended countless ink praising shows far less competent than this one—and if they rifled through their clips and had some residual grace to go with their more-than-abundant venom, they’d own up to it.

(I’ve seen far worse shows mounted at the Roundabout alone (Paula Vogel’s shrill Red State satire The Mineola Twins, along with A Streetcar Named Desire, with John C. Reilly horrifyingly miscast as Stanley Kowalski and Natasha Richardson—undoubtedly as dear a lady as the obits have made her out to be—just not up, for whatever reason, to the demanding role of Blanche).

Yet whatever criticism accrued to either production paled compared with what happened here. You’d think that poor Mary-Louise Parker had murdered a batch of students rather than her fiercely conflicted modern anti-hero. (In fact, an Off-Broadway revival a few years ago starring Elizabeth Marvel featured acts a thousand times more bizarre than anything here (e.g., a tomato-juice dowsing) – and many critics found no real problem with the proceedings!)

Even the beginning of the play made critics take umbrage, as the audience became aware that Ms. Parker’s Hedda was lying face down in a disheveled red gown, baring her derriere. The fuss was beyond me, given that the past two decades have seen a number of actors and actresses exposing far more of their skin (including full-frontal nudity) than did Ms. Parker—and with far less motivation or realism.

Sexuality and its limits, after all, are at the heart of this drama. It’s not only that Hedda’s beauty is mentioned by more than one character, but that she uses her sexuality as a test. She wants to manage the destiny of others (such as a former lover) but thrashes about wildly at the thought that sex could leave her under the control of anyone else. Remarks that she is “glowing” and that she appears to have put on weight are enough to anger her—a clear indication that she fears pregnancy will bind her further in marriage.

At least Parker came up with some interesting, though not strange, stage business for her intelligent but emotionally constricted character, including playing the piano—hinting at the creative impulses she thinks has been buried in marriage to Jurgen, an academic whose thesis is the drably titled Domestic Crafts of Holland and Belgium in the Middle Ages.

No, I’m afraid that if the show’s depiction of Hedda seemed murky to many reviewers (and, let’s be fair, not a few theatergoers who complained online), the fault lies less with director and actress than with the playwright.

Hedda Gabler is the female counterpart to Hamlet: a character who continually resists being reshaped by others, a figure of great potential but equally great complexity and torment, someone who makes the course of the play deviate wildly away from conventional melodrama with her absolute unpredictability.

Too intelligent and talented for her husband or the proper Victorian society he represents, she turns to mischief. The name of the play itself is itself a tipoff of her dilemma, for Hedda remains the headstrong daughter of a general rather than the dutiful wife of an academic.

I’ve seen Parker in innumerable movie and TV appearances, but never onstage. This performance hasn’t discouraged me in the slightest. Her interpretation of her iconic role—restless, angry—sometimes entirely within the spirit of Ibsen’s text.

With her dark brown eyes and pale white screen luminous in the darkness of the American Airlines Theatre, she vividly embodied a woman who could only find fulfillment in destruction. “I am burning a child,” she says desperately as she tosses the work of a lifetime into the fire.

The other cast members have the thankless task for injecting complexity into characters that Ibsen created as mere foils for his ineffectual female rebel. Michael Cerveris made for a Sweeney Todd you couldn’t take your eyes off of a few years ago, but here, by necessity, he practically fades into the woodwork as Hedda’s clueless husband. (You can imagine her frustration with him—kind of like punching endlessly into a pile of feathers.) Peter Stormare invests Judge Brack with the kind of arrogance that makes you believe him when he says he wants to be “cock of the walk.”

In a post-show discussion with dramaturg Ted Sod, Patricia Denison of Barnard College illuminated the challenges of staging a play that is primarily character-driven as opposed to being a women’s rights manifesto—and, thus, infinitely challenging now as it was more than a century ago.

A few nights ago, one of my friends came up with a measured assessment of the play that did it far more justice than any of the critics did. She thought it was well-done, but not something that people had to rush out to see. That pretty much sums up my feelings, too.