While doing visual research for Hedda Gabler, I stumbled upon the 19th-century Norwegian painter Harriet Backer. I had never heard of her, never seen her paintings before. Several of these paintings depict Norwegian household interiors with women engaged in solitary tasks. I like to imagine Backer painted these women the way they might have seen themselves: intelligent and wistful for
HEDDA GABLER
a life that doesn’t stifle them. These women seem so melancholy in their living rooms and kitchens, and looking at them, I understand even more deeply why Hedda fears the dull domesticity of her married life with Tesman. The more I learned about Harriet Backer and her sister Agathe, the more I saw in them the life Hedda might have dreamed about living instead. Agathe Backer traveled abroad to study piano, and Harriet accompanied her, beginning her own visual art career. Especially in Hedda’s final piano melody, her aspiration to artistic and personal freedom breaks through. Henrik Ibsen wrote the words his heroine says, but only through the body and performance of a woman on stage does Hedda burst into life. While the women in Backer’s paintings are frozen at the desk or the piano, Hedda pushes on the boundaries of middle-class femininity in the pursuit of a beautiful life. Her circumstances press on her so that the only way to create beauty is to make art of a man’s destiny and her own. To say this, I do not glorify Hedda’s choices; rather I am attempting to see them through her eyes. To give her and the women of Backer’s paintings their due—to give the storytellers you will see onstage today their due. This whole ensemble was relentless in their own imagination: delving into domestic economy in the Belgian Low Country during the Middle Ages, the supposed future of culture, the story a Black woman’s hair tells to the only other woman of color in town, the precarity of being a servant and the power of being a police commissioner, the way transwomen navigated the 19th century, and everything in between. As the lights come up on the Tesmans’ living room, it’s time to join them. —Hannah Fennell Gellman, Production Dramaturg STUDIO PRODUCTIONS | 2021–22 SEASON ABOVE: Blått interiør by Harriet Backer, 1883. National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Norway).