Hilda

The play might be aptly renamed Everybody Loves Hilda, or more accurately, Everybody Wants Hilda. But who is Hilda? What is she, that all these people command her? Hard to say, as she is never seen onstage and never voices her own opinion. Instead, everyone else speaks on her behalf, adapting her identity to suit their own needs, and chipping away at her soul until she is a complete nonentity, only a reflection of other people's dreams and desires.

In the opening scene, an upper-class housewife demands that her handyman Frank's titular wife come to work as her housekeeper and nanny. Mrs. Lemarchand has never even met Hilda, nor does she care to before the employment begins, but she is obsessed with the young woman's name and is determined to have Hilda in her house and under her thumb. The handsomely coarse husband is understandably wary, but the lure of money draws him to answer in his wife's name, and the three are immediately caught in a game of domination and subjugation. Each claims to love Hilda more than the other, and each uses that love as an excuse to control her, regardless of the metaphorically (and ultimately, literally) absent Hilda's wishes.

Playwright Marie Ndiaye's satirical barbs immediately and gleefully sink into Mrs. Lemarchand and her much flaunted hypocrisy. Despite her persistent avowals of liberalism, the lady can barely hide her sadistic joy in overwhelming this poor family and commanding every aspect of not only Hilda's life, but Frank's. She smiles blandly as she easily pulls Hilda away from Frank and into her own world as a living doll, assuring him all the while that, as a liberal, Hilda's needs are her primary concern. Of course, this gross abuse of power is meant to be satirical; bizarrely and tragically funny. And while it is certainly bizarre, the satire, while sharp, is too clumsy and awkward to reach the levels of tragedy and comedy that the situations deserve. Mrs. Lemarchand is presented as a caricature rather than a true character, and the frighteningly real social mindset to which she devoutly and blindly clings becomes a mere joke, worthy perhaps of our laughter and derision but not our thoughtful consideration. Ultimately, the play is both dramatically and comically weaker for it.

As the dominating Mrs. Lemarchand, Ellen Karas is magnetic, speaking in arias with a frozen smile etched into her face. Her genteel mannerisms barely conceal the merciless cruelty beneath the surface, and despite the overblown dialogue she is forced to speak, she makes the character memorable. Michael Earle is appropriately handsome and gruff as Hilda's lost and bewildered husband, but is confined to emoting his way through (more or less) three words throughout the play: "I want Hilda!" With stronger material to work with, Mr. Earle could have turned in a wonderfully memorable performance. In a brief turn as Hilda's younger sister Corrine, Brandy Burre provides an apt foil for Mrs. Lemarchand's sweet venom, uncowed beneath the barely veiled insults. Donald Eastman's starkly brilliant set is a perfect study of less-is-more, showing off the emotional colorlessness of Mrs. Lemarchand's world in pure white, with a bannerless staircase dominating all. Costumer David Draper's brilliant colors for Mrs. Lemarchand and dull hues for Frank are almost shocking against the white background, nicely adding to the edginess of the play. Carey Perloff's sharp direction keeps the actors almost constantly at 90-degree angles to everything, either facing fully front or in profile. They, like the set, are rarely on a diagonal, but only appear in one way or the other. It is an effective reminder of Mrs. Lemarchand's twisted bourgeois mindset: there are no diagonals, nor are there shades of gray. Nor, ultimately, are there servants. There is only back and forth, left and right, white and black, slave and master.