Old Play in Manhattan

The Wild Duck (by Henrik Ibsen) opened the annual winter season at Manhattan's City Center. It also opened the door to a musty attic. Under the dust and cobwebs that shroud Ibsen's classic, there may still lie something vital. But far from uncovering it, the present production treasures every cobweb and

merges less a Norwegian problem play than a mid-Victorian period piece.

In The Wild Duck, the archrealist Ibsen conceded--long before O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh--that men need illusions to survive. The Ekdal family are happy so long as Hialmar Ekdal is ignorant of his wife's past and the true paternity of his child. Ibsen's exposure of Gregers Werle, the meddling idealist who enlightens Hialmar in the name of truth, is merciless. But his portrayal of flabby, feckless, self-excusing Hialmar is hardly less so.

Today, Ibsen--dotting every i, megaphoning every idea--seems most merciless toward his audience. And the current production is not only didactic, but thoroughly inept. Maurice Evans, for example, portrays Hialmar so broadly that he might be playing Micawber, so stagily that he might be spouting blank verse.

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