A rarely seen Ibsen play, The Lady from the Sea blends a great deal of poetic symbolism and language with his dramatized psychological realism and social (especially feminist) and scientific concerns. Some consider the work to be atypical because it has a happy ending. No doubt, there's a larger than usual cast for a domestic as well as late Ibsen drama.
Having started The Lady from the Sea during a summer in Jutland, Ibsen made full use of the sea and its aura: The play occurs entirely out of doors. For the FSU/Asolo Conservatory production, scenes from veranda to seaside cliffs seem carved from gray-green rock walls and flat surfaces in Rick Cannon's abstract set. In the background, a heavy blue sky and presumed fjord beneath it appear wedged in by forms of black mountains. They make it impossible for Ellida to see the sea from whose shore she came when she married widower Dr. Wangel.
In the three years since the death of their child, Ellida and Wangel have not had sexual relations. Unaccepted by her stepdaughters, Ellida's spent most of her time in a cove, missing the sea. Into the bleak atmosphere come Lungstran, forced to be a sailor by his father but now a happy would-be sculptor, and the girls' former tutor, Arnholm. Dr. Wangel invited him to cheer Ellida, since he once loved her, and the doctor unselfishly thinks a renewal of that love might cure her mental affliction.
Actually, ten years ago Ellida was to marry a wild sailor. He killed a superior but, before escaping, bound her to him in a sort of mutual marriage to the sea. When she wrote of breaking her promise to wait for him, he assured he'd return to take her back. Later, the look of her dead child persuaded Ellida the sailor retained strange, dark powers over her.
In dread to continue living as Wangel's wife, Ellida's been so strange that Bolette, who wants to get away, is afraid to be like her and marry an older man (Arnholm), but even more, to leave her father with Ellida. Then too, his other daughter Hilde's been hateful toward her stepmother because she can't connect with her.
A final choice faces Ellida when a ship brings in The Stranger, the returned sailor, to fetch her. Both he and Dr. Wangel make offers to win her. Which one will she feel free to be with, which to reject? The conclusion could well be one to a feminist romantic opera, with philosophic and poetic declamation rivaling song. Tony Lawrence's sound design mixes eerie with melodramatic.
With The Lady from the Sea, FSU/Asolo Conservatory fittingly pursues its aims of providing a challenge to actors in training and having them and audiences experience classic drama. Though a minor Ibsen play, it offers motifs, symbolism, subplot parallels and a heroine not unusual in his output. Under Andrei Malaev-Babel's confident direction, it's akin to a product of currently popular "magic realism."
Always central to the action, Katie Cunningham rightly underplays Ellida's intense emotions. She gets away with over-the-top stringy red hair and dresses that look like beautiful nightgowns. (David Walker's other costumes for the cast look like those typically seen in Ibsen plays, with women's balloon sleeves and men's stiff collars attractively modified.)
Projecting age convincingly, Benjamin Boucvalt as Dr. Wangel and Luke Bartholomew as Arnholm are in tune with their characters' fine qualities. Summer Dawn Wallace captures the conflict in Bolette, while Megan Delay manages well fundamental changes in Hilde's conduct.
Ibsen's original outlandish physical description of The Stranger doesn't apply to rugged but handsome Jake Staley, so one can believe Ellida's attraction to the sailor. Exuberant Jon-Michael Miller gives Lungstrum appeal despite his ego. Geoff Knox provides commentary as Ballested, a foreign artist who's adapted to the Norwegian small-town environment. Walk-ons as townspeople and tourists give more Conservatory students a chance to be on stage, and audiences see a production that doesn't skimp on casting in these frugal times.
