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Heddatron. Les Frères Corbusier. Manhattan, HERE Arts Center. February 8 - 25, 2006.
When I heard that Les Frères Corbusier, one of New York's most lauded young avant-garde companies, was doing a version of Hedda Gabler utilizing robots, I immediately thought of Lee Breuer's recent Mabou Mines Dollhouse, which set Ibsen production in New York on its ear by using dwarf actors for the male roles and tall, almost Valkyriesque actresses for the female ones. The point that this casting made about the arbitrariness, indeed the absurdity of the male/female power relationships in the society of Ibsen's play was marvelously theatrical, even stunning. [See Marvin Carlson's review in INC 25, 2005]. The point was thoroughly made in the first five minutes of the production, however, after which the actors had a full evening to fill out with an often uninspired reading of the text (in a peculiar pseudo-Scandinavian accent), enlivened, often effectively and occasionally not, by the imagination of the ingenious and iconoclastic director.
I assumed that Les Frères Corbusier were embarked on a similar project, casting most of the characters around Hedda as robots to suggest, visually and metaphorically, their mindless programming to follow tradition and custom, a point that I feared would be, like that of Breuer's dwarf actors, made in a few minutes with most of the play still to be gotten through. But as I should have known from the previous productions of this imaginative company, like the Very Merry Unauthorized Children 's Scientology Project (2003), The Franklin Thesis (2002), and last year's Boozy, a Monty-Pythonesque take on Robert Moses and the company's namesake "Le Corbusier," Heddatron made no attempt to follow the text and action of Ibsen's work. It was instead a lunatic collage of material inspired by Ibsen and his play, but drawing equally upon references, motifs, and plot from a wide variety of mostly modern and contemporary pop cultural references, and particularly from film and television. To the extent that Heddatron has a plot, this concerns the attempt of a sixth-grade girl, Nugget, delightfully portrayed by Spenser Leigh, to deliver a parody school report (to the authence) on the life and work of Ibsen. The work's two major dramatic actions are spun out of this report. Center...