Integrity Fever

The Wild Duck. Henrik Ibsen asked men and women to be honest with themselves. He saw most human beings as hypocrites of the heart, defilers of the mind, and desiccators of the spirit. In his plays he waged an inexorable assault on the timid frauds, the sick souls, and audaciously exposed social dry rot. Integrity was his dramatic Excalibur. The profound irony of The Wild Duck is that it unflinchingly examines the human havoc that can result from so ruthless a devotion to honesty.

Gregers Werle (Clayton Corzatte) is a man with a raging case of "integrity fever" who prates high-mindedly of "the claim of the ideal." His pinched nostrils seem to sniff moral pollution in the air. He abominates his widowed father, a pompous timber merchant, accusing him of real and fancied slights to his dead mother. Taking lodgings in the modest household of a former classmate, Hjalmar Ekdal (Donald Moffat), Gregers uncovers more extensive proof of his father's evil ways. Not only did he bring lifelong disgrace to Hjalmar's father through a crooked timber deal, but he also seduced Hjalmar's wife (Betty Miller), a former housekeeper in the Werle household; Gregers' father sired the little daughter that Hjalmar dotes on as his own. As an act of expiation, the elder Werle all but supports the Ekdal household.

Hjalmar and his wife have built a happy house of illusions. In a constant alcoholic trance, Hjalmar's father stocks the attic with birds and rabbits, at which he takes an occasional potshot when he is in a hunting mood. Hjalmar himself is a dilettantish portrait photographer whose wife manages the business while he nurses the mirage that he is on the threshold of a world-shaking scientific discovery. The little girl (Jennifer Harmon) is content merely to love her supposed father and her pet wild duck.

To Gregers, this happiness is corrupt. These people must purge themselves of illusions, face bruising realities. He bluntly tells them the truth of things, and in one way or another kills the family he hoped to cure. A cynically humane doctor tells him of another cure: "I try to discover the basic lie, the pet illusion, that makes life possible, and then I foster it."

Any duel between appearance and reality is so close to the main artery of drama's heart that it is intrinsically exciting. Nonetheless, the APA production of The Wild Duck is cozy when it should be caustic, chucklesome when it should roar with outraged laughter, genteelly aggrieved when it ought to be spurting pain. The APA troupe does its customarily accomplished job of acting and touches off sporadic match flares of understanding throughout the play, but Ibsen had a crueler intention: to drag everything and everyone screaming into unrelenting light.

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