The Wild Duck
Written by Henrik Ibsen in a new version by David Eldridge; Directed by Simon Godwin
Theater for a New Audience at Polonsky Shakespeare Center | 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn 11217
September 18 - 28
Photo credit: Gerry Goodstein
In the icy hinterlands of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, the playwright—a master dissector of the human condition—places under his scalpel not just the lofty ideals of truth and justice, but the quieter, more insidious mechanisms by which people survive. Ibsen coined the term “life-lies” in this haunting drama, a phrase both delicate and damning, to describe the fragile illusions we wrap around ourselves like threadbare quilts to endure life’s chill. But what happens when someone comes along and insists self-righteously on tearing those illusions away? In The Wild Duck, the answer is not enlightenment. It is ruin.
Presented in a joint production between Theatre for a New Audience and the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Simon Godwin’s taut, lucid, and emotionally exacting staging of David Eldridge’s adaptation retains all the play’s searing moral conflict, even as it charges forward with a clipped, contemporary rhythm. To be sure, if one is familiar with Ibsen’s dramaturgy—its shadows, its moral traps, its hidden diseases—then yes, you may clock the eventual devastation long before it arrives. And yet, the raw power of this production, with its uncanny blend of humor, sorrow, and intellectual provocation, transcends predictability. Even as we brace for the fall, we remain horrified by the crash.
The play’s title, The Wild Duck, is drawn from a seemingly incidental anecdote—an account of a duck wounded by the elder Werle during a hunting expedition, only to be retrieved by his loyal dog and handed over, half-drowned and near death, to the care of the Ekdal household. Nursed back to health yet never released, the mallard now resides in a cluttered loft, a makeshift menagerie where Old Ekdal, in moments of fevered nostalgia, stages ghostly reenactments of his former hunting glories. This bedraggled creature, flapping its clipped wings in symbolic captivity, comes to embody the central metaphor of the play: it is one of the living “life-lies.” The duck, like the Ekdals themselves, lives in a fragile ecosystem of illusion. It is not merely an animal, but an emblem of survival through self-deception, of the elaborate fictions we construct to preserve a sense of purpose, dignity, or identity long after the world has stripped them from us. In its confinement, the duck mirrors Old Ekdal’s own psychological entrapment—a man reduced to pantomiming the life he once led, surrounded by props of a past that no longer exists. Thus, the wounded mallard, flapping mutely in the attic shadows, becomes the soul of Ibsen’s tragic world: a world in which truth may be fatal, and illusion—however tattered—remains our last defense against despair.
At the center of the narrative’s slow, grinding collapse is Gregers Werle, portrayed with a disquieting mix of naïve intensity and messianic fervor by Alexander Hurt. Gregers returns home after years of estrangement from his industrialist father, the cold and calculating Håkon Werle (Robert Stanton, wielding menace with the economy of a banker closing accounts). Gregers carries with him not just the resentment of a neglected son, but a grand, inflated sense of moral mission—one which he quickly inflicts upon the unfortunate Ekdal family, led by his childhood friend Hjalmar.
Nick Westrate’s Hjalmar is a marvelous mess—a man drenched in delusion, bloated with the unearned gravitas of a “great inventor” who never invents, and cushioned by the invisible labor of others. Chief among those others is Gina, his wife, played with extraordinary, grounded resolve by Melanie Field. Gina is the very emblem of the “capable woman” archetype: smart, sharp, emotionally nimble, and exhausted. She runs the house, the photography studio, the finances, the family, and her husband’s fragile ego—all while absorbing the simmering grief and shame that undergirds their precarious existence. It is a masterful performance, tightly coiled and quietly devastating.
Once a man of stature and enterprise, Old Ekdal—portrayed with spectral poignancy by David Patrick Kelly—once stood shoulder to shoulder with Håkon Werle in business, until a shadowy and morally ambiguous scheme, likely orchestrated by the very man who once called him partner, brought about his public disgrace and incarceration. Now released, he returns not as a redeemed figure but as a ghost of his former self, living in quiet humiliation and half-mad nostalgia. Yet, it is through the dubious charity of Werle—whose motives reek more of guilt than generosity—that the Ekdal family has been permitted to eke out a threadbare existence. This lifeline, extended from on high, provides their material survival while allowing Werle to sleep a little easier at night, absolved, perhaps, in his own eyes if no one else’s. Werle ensures his past indiscretions are neatly absorbed into another man’s domestic narrative. It is an act cloaked in paternal concern but steeped in manipulation, a transaction wherein the lives of others are shuffled like chess pieces to preserve the dignity of the king. That Hjalmar enters this arrangement blissfully unaware of its full implications only deepens the tragedy, as his sense of autonomy and masculinity rests upon a foundation built, quite literally, by another man’s guilt.
And then there is Hedvig—their daughter, played with openhearted luminosity by Maaike Laanstra-Corn. Hedvig is the innocent heart of this story, the soft underbelly of all that will be torn apart. The play asks unthinkable things of her. The world offers her very little. What she gives in return is almost too painful to speak of.
Into this delicate ecosystem Gregers storms, armed with the bludgeon of truth. Believing himself to be a liberator, he reveals secrets Gina hoped would remain buried—and in doing so, he sets fire to the scaffolding upon which this family has built their fragile peace. His creed is that of the idealist: he believes that truth, no matter how brutal, must be spoken; that falsehood is a spiritual poison. Nurturing a festering resentment toward his emotionally remote and ethically compromised father, he cloaks his personal vendetta in the lofty rhetoric of moral purity and spiritual awakening. This is not a man of courage or conviction forged through experience, but rather a sheltered scion wielding philosophy like a blunt instrument, unaware of its human cost. His decision to expose Gina’s long-buried secrets to her husband is framed as a noble gesture—an appeal to “live in truth”—but it functions more accurately as an act of psychological violence, a rupture enacted under the guise of righteousness. That this truth might simultaneously tarnish his father's reputation is, for Gregers, not an unfortunate byproduct but a quiet bonus—one suspects he would toast to it in private. In this, he emerges not as a liberator, but as a sanctimonious saboteur, tragically unaware that ideals, when wielded without empathy, can be as ruinous as lies. Like so many ideologues, he fails to account for human texture. People are not diagrams. They do not respond uniformly to revelation. Some, when stripped of their illusions, simply shatter.
And shatter Hjalmar does. Westrate walks a fine line between buffoonery and tragedy, and it works. His Hjalmar is not particularly bright, nor brave, nor even all that sympathetic—but he is broken. And it is in that breaking that we glimpse something horrifyingly human.
Enter Doctor Relling, played with a biting, weary brilliance by Matthew Saldivar. His diagnosis of Gregers—“Chronic Righteousness”—lands as both a joke and a judgment. Relling is not a man of great virtue, but he understands the delicate equilibrium of human psychology. He knows that sometimes lies are not cowardice but mercy. That sometimes, to remove the veil is not to free a person but to unmoor them. His anger at Gregers is not only justified—it becomes the moral anchor of the play. In a production of many fine performances, Saldivar’s is a standout: wry, soulful, and quietly gutting.
The production design matches the story’s stark emotional palette. Andrew Boyce’s set—a sort of lofted interior, half-atelier, half-prison—feels both expansive and claustrophobic, as if the ceiling might collapse under the weight of unspoken truths. Stacey Derosier’s lighting is painterly: shafts of light cut through the murk like divine judgment or morning regret, shifting with the emotional weather. Heather C. Freedman’s costumes further delineate character: Gina’s severe, gray dress—a kind of working-class armor—contrasts sharply with the fur-clad Mrs. Sørby, while Håkon Werle’s entrance into the Ekdal home, cloaked in a luxurious fur coat and absurdly small sunglasses, is a visual aria of wealth, menace, and emotional detachment. He looks like a polar bear who pays alimony.
A stark, almost ascetic quality permeates Darron L West’s sound design, imbuing the production with an aural landscape that echoes the emotional austerity of Ibsen’s world. Most striking is the contribution of Alexander Sovronsky, who appears between acts like a mournful apparition, drawing forth from his solo viola a series of haunting, elegiac strains. These interludes do not merely serve as transitional moments—they deepen the atmosphere of unease, underscoring the slow collapse of illusion with a sound that feels at once intimate and foreboding. Sovronsky’s playing, unadorned and full of aching resonance, becomes a kind of Greek chorus in miniature: wordless, but heavy with premonition. The silences that follow are even heavier for it.
Director Simon Godwin deserves high praise for the production’s simmering tension. He constructs the emotional arc with the care of a watchmaker. The first act clicks forward with the quiet assurance of a domestic drama. But then Gregers begins his meddling, and with each confession and confrontation, we hear the unmistakable crack of pressure building in glass. By the final moments, the pane shatters—and we are left among the shards, stunned.
In the end, The Wild Duck is less about the beauty of truth than the necessity of illusion. Ibsen’s tragedy lies not in a family’s sin, but in the destruction of the fictions that allowed them to survive. This production, elegant in design and ruthless in emotion, reminds us that not all truths liberate. Some truths kill. And sometimes the greatest villain is the man who insists on telling the truth at all costs.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on September 18, 2025. All rights reserved.