In terms of Titus, the staging concept there was about obscuring events and exchanges between characters just enough so that each audience member was challenged to draw connections her/himself. Many of the moments that happened downstage in full view were also staged with an ambiguity of traditional cause-effect logic in mind for this same reason. The goal was to free you to take in the images and poetry on a purely visceral level and use them to build your own story.

Obviously, your mileage may vary, but it was a step towards a new way of thinking about storytelling at Court Theatre, and many who saw it–myself included–found it pretty thrilling.

That said, the idea behind building out the Wait Until Dark set to include a bathroom that only some of the audience will see was not a part of that same exploration–it was more about a fun trick for the set designer and director to pull off together that will hopefully enhance the tense atmosphere of the play.

But there’s no essential visual information being communicated in the bathroom off stage right, for instance, that someone in a house left seat won’t hear the actors and understand perfectly well.

As for the translation question, Michael is correct that the duck is described as “biting” into the weeds, which certainly adds something to the larger metaphor. However, we should note that, in actual fact, this is not an observed animal behavior, just some hyperbole from Ibsen.

I kid.

Actually, it’s my opinion (and I believe the production shares this view) that the question of Hedvig’s parentage is sort of a red herring. Anyone who’s listening knows exactly what the score is as soon as Gregers figures it out towards the beginning of Act II (Hjalmar: “It’s hereditary.” Gregers: “WHAT?”). The idea that the parentage question drives the plot for the audience is a convention of melodrama that Ibsen is consciously subverting–one of many, I think. The real question (or one of the many possible real questions) is when is the coin finally going to drop for Hjalmar, and when it does, what chaos is he capable of causing for his hapless family? The “OPTICAL SUPPLIES” sign on the back wall is, to my eye, a gag meant to point up Ibsen’s irreverence for the cliches of his contemporary theater.

Regarding your comment about the translation, let me point our Dramaturg and our Norwegian scholar to this post and see if they have anything to add.

I’m glad you dug the show!

The opticians’ sign on the back wall of the set, I think unfortunately, really hits the audience over the head about the genetic clue, early enough begun to be given in the script. Is it there, where Hjalmar could see it everyday, to emphasize that he should have realized much earlier that Hedvig was Werle’s daughter?

I’ve read the play as translated in 1968 by R. V. Forslund. If I heard the Court’s performance correctly, in Act II, when old Ekdal describes a wild duck’s dive to the bottom, there is, in my opinion, an important variance between his and Mr. Nelsons’s translations of these lines. From Forslund: “They dive as deep as they can and then they bite into the seaweed and long grasses or any damn thing they can get hold of down there. That way they make sure they’ll never come up again.” The present performance has lines to the effect that the ducks get tangled up, not that they cling with absolute determination to never resurface. This is a big change to the meaning for me- anyone else? That same variance recurred in Act III; as Forslund had it [Gregers to Hjalmar] “You, too, have plunged down and fastened yourself to the weeds-”.

We attended the Thursday, January 15th performance. There was a 39 below zero windchill, and we had to drive back to Valparaiso, IN, so we couldn’t stay for the discussion afterward.

Our party of 4 were glad to have attended despite that weather.