Category: DC Theater

Posted on in DC Art, DC Theater, Drama, Henrik Ibsen, Klein Theater, lifestyle, ModernDrama, MustSeeTheatre, PsychologicalRealism, RarePerformance, Shakespeare Theater Company, SimonGodwin, The Front Page of Style, The Wild Duck, Theater

The Wild Duck Soars Again

Ibsen’s Rarest Masterpiece Flies Through Moral Fog

Robert Stanton as Håkon Werle  and Mahira Kakkar as Mrs Sørby in The Wild Duck. Photo by Hollis King 

Looking for the garage exit elevator into Klein Theatre last Thursday evening, I met Angela Lee Gieras, Executive Director of Shakespeare Theatre Company, She accompanied me in the correct elevator to the main lobby where she introduced me to Artistic Director Simon Godwin. Shaking my hand, he offered quiet advice that stirred my curiosity,  “This might be the only and last time you will see this play in our lifetime.”

That alone should compel you to see Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck before it closes November 16.

Unique and Complex

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), often called “the father of modern drama” and three-time Nobel Prize nominee, built his reputation on explosive social critiques—A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People—plays that attacked the hypocrisies of 19th-century society. In The Wild Duck, considered by many to be his finest work, he turns his sharp eye inward. Here, he draws from his privileged Norwegian family. Ibsen created Gregers Werle, the idealistic crusader determined to expose truth at any cost. This was inspired by members of his own patrician class. He named his young duck-loving heroine, Hedvig, the same name as his grandmother.

The play is complex. Understanding the author’s circumstances, background, and character, helps hold the ‘color’ of the play. In The Wild Duck, Ibsen was not attacking society’s lies. He was attacking the idealism of his family and overeager reformers. The question is not whether we should seek truth, but whether forcing truth on others is salvation or destruction. That moral ambiguity is perhaps, why this masterpiece has been performed so rarely.

L. Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle, Robert Stanton as Håkon Werle in The Wild Duck. Photo by Hollis King.  R. Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle, Nick Westrate as Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck. Photo by Gerry Goodstein. 

Nothing Is As It Seems

Simon Godwin’s production, adapted by David Eldridge, opens with Victorian elegance—men in tails, ladies in ornate gowns, an elaborate dinner party. The set is bathed in shades of green. A small, grey-bearded man vanishes through a green door then reappears. He resembled a quintessential leprechaun though the play is set in Norway. He is the disgraced nature-loving Lieutenant who raises then hunts and shoots rabbits in his son’s loft.  His son has embarked on a mission to restore his father’s honor.

The production is punctuated by haunting musical interludes—Alexander Sovronsky performs arrangements of 19th-century Norwegian folk and classical music on viola, Hardanger fiddle, and langeleik. Like the narrators in Shakespeare’s plays, the music shifts between melodic reflection and foreboding darkness, guiding us through the play’s emotional terrain.

As Godwin notes in the program, Ibsen is asking something far more dangerous than honor: “In the battle for moral certainty, who is the casualty? What is the price of truth?”

L. Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal  Center: Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig R. Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck. Photos by Gerry Goodstein. 

The Typhoid Mary of Idealism

The wealthy idealist, Gregers Werle, ‘knows’ what is best for everyone. He spreads his convictions like contagion—what I describe as ‘Typhoid Mary’ in Victorian tails – delusional in his certainty that he is saving everyone by forcing them to face “truth.”

Ibsen was intimately familiar with this character. Ibsen belonged to Norway’s patrician elite, and The Wild Duck draws from his own family’s dynamics as they navigated the evolution of society. Gregers embodies the dangers of Ibsen’s own class—reformers who wield truth as a weapon.

What happens when someone appoints themselves the arbiter of others’ honesty? When does truth-telling become destruction? The answers are not simple. This is perhaps, why this play has been performed so rarely.

L: Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle Photo by Hollis King  Center: Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle, Nick Westrate as Hjalmar Ekdal Photo by Gerry Goodstein R: Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle Photo by Hollis King 

Mental Gymnastics Required

The Wild Duck demands the audience’s full attention for which they are rewarded. Nick Westrate (recently in STC’s Frankenstein) and Melanie Field (the heartbreaking Sonya in STC’s Uncle Vanya) lead a flawless ensemble. Maaike Laanstra-Corn’s Hedvig, the young duck-loving girl, caught in the adults’ web of lies, delivers a performance that lingers long after the stage goes dark.  The 26-year-old Washington, DC native and Brown University graduate is an artist to watch.

I felt like a voyeur and a gossip throughout the play. I was the voyeur at that dinner party, wondering what came next. Then a gossip, observing the Ekdal household. It felt like I was overhearing through a parlor wall. It felt intimate, forbidden, yet addictive. I was inside their home, yet uninvited. My real estate mind went into calculation mode of the Ekdal house – how many rooms, how many square feet, how much were they asking for the rent of their spare room?

The audience was silent.  No one even cleared their throat. When the lights dimmed, and the play ended, the audience stood up in unison, applauding politely. The applause was respectful, reverent, and slightly haunted. We were processing.

L: Nick Westrate as Hjalmar Ekdal, Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig – Photo by Hollis King.  L: Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Nick Westrate as Hjalmar Ekdal – Photo by Gerry Goodstein 

Why You Should Go

The Wild Duck is not a feel-good play. It is a feel-smart play. If you want to wrestle with questions about truth and delusion that feel urgently relevant in 2025, when crusaders of all stripes claim absolute certainty about what is best for everyone—this is your play.

What makes this play essential is Ibsen’s unprecedented psychological depth and intricacy of character. He peels back layers of late 19th-century culture and morals with surgical precision, revealing not just what people said, but what they believed, feared, and concealed. Anton Chekhov, who considered Ibsen his favorite writer, adopted this pioneering focus on psychological realism—the exploration of ordinary lives with extraordinary depth. Chekhov developed his own distinctive style with greater emphasis on subtext and naturalistic dialogue, but the foundation was Ibsen’s radical insistence that theatre could reveal the human psyche with the intuition of a psychological case study.

If you were moved by Melanie Field’s Sonya in Uncle Vanya earlier this season, then you will appreciate the direct inspiration from Ibsen to Chekhov being honored by the Shakespeare Theater Company. Both playwrights understood that the most profound dramas unfold not in grand gestures, but in the quiet devastation of people confronting uncomfortable truths about themselves and the society that shaped them.

Ibsen meticulously controlled how his work was interpreted; writing detailed instructions to directors for The Wild Duck productions. This most personal of his plays deserves to be seen with the care Godwin has brought to it, even if just once. After exploring Ibsen’s background for this blog, I find myself compelled to return—to see with new eyes what I missed the first time, armed now with understanding of what the playwright was truly after.

L: Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig -Photo by Hollis King  R: Maaike Laanstra-Corn as Hedvig, David Patrick Kelly as Old Ekdal, Nick Westrate as Hjalmar Ekdal, Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal, Alexander Hurt as Gregers Werle – Photo by Gerry Goodstein 

The Wild Duck runs through November 16 at Klein Theatre. Tickets: ShakespeareTheatre.org or 202.547.1122

Artist Fellow Elise Ansel's interpretation of Macbeth's witches
Posted on in All's Well That Ends Well, art, Beethoven, Boydell Gallery, Boydell Revisted, Cymbeline, DC Art, DC Theater, Falstaff, Folger Artist Fellow, Folger Library, Henry V, Imagining Shakespeare: Mythmaking and Storytelling in the Regency Era, King Lear, lifestyle, Macbeth, Mythmaking and Storytelling, Old Masters, Regency Era, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare Folger Library, Shakespeare Regency Art, Taming of the Shrew

When Shakespeare Meets Canvas:

From Old Masters to Modern Mavericks

Excerpt from Image No. 6. Romeo and Juliet. Act 5. Scene 3. Painted by Mr. Northcote, R.A.

Before the play, Julius X, started I spent the early evening viewing the latest Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, Imagining Shakespeare: Mythmaking and Storytelling in the Regency Era. I realized that different artists perceive the same Shakespeare scenes in wildly different facets. At the entrance to the exhibit, I was greeted by Henry Fuseli’s witches from 1793, complete with dramatic robes and theatrical setting, juxtaposed with Artist Fellow Elise Ansel’s 2024 abstract interpretation of that same scene, where the witches dissolve into swirling brushstrokes of orange, white, and red against deep black.

Same story. Different worlds.

The Boydell Collection: Shakespeare as Blockbuster

Walking past modernism, I was greeted with Regency Era historical heavyweights. The fourteen canvases now hanging at the Folger come from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery—the 18th century’s attempt at a Shakespeare cinematic universe. John Boydell and his nephew Josiah opened this fashionable London gallery in 1789, amassing 173 paintings (almost half of them life-size) by 35 different artists. Think of it as the Metropolitan Museum meets a Shakespeare theme park.

Only about one third of these paintings survive today. The Folger has the largest remaining collection. When seen together for the first time since 1805, one realizes that these were not simply illustrations. They were storytelling on a grand scale.

The artists read like a who’s who of British painting: Robert Smirke (32 paintings), William Hamilton, Richard Westall, Francis Wheatley, George Romney, James Northcote, and Julius Ibbetson. Each brought their own style to Shakespeare’s words, sharing a common vision: make the drama leap off the page and into visual space.

When Witches Get a Modern Makeover

Artist Fellows “…tease out the threads connecting the early modern world to our lives today.” Above, Henry Fuseli’s Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793) has been reinterpreted by Artist Fellow, Elise Ansel with color, light, and shape.

Fast-forward to today where Folger Artist Fellow Elise Ansel takes on the same Macbeth witches that Fuseli painted in 1793. Instead of recognizable figures in a dark landscape, she renders visual energy—what she calls “graceful, wavelike brushstrokes, echoed in watts of gold.”

In her piece The Nature of Witches, abstract shapes suggest bodies without defining them. In Untying the Winds, the witches become more elemental—muted swirls that might “untie” the winds from Macbeth. The gray brushstrokes feel darker, more aggressive, as if the painting itself embodies the storm building in the play.

Where Fuseli’s witches are frightening and haggish (as Shakespeare wrote them), Ansel transforms them into something more ambiguous. They are powerful, fluid, almost beautiful in their danger.

What Makes Old Master Paintings “Old Master?”

I noticed, as noted, when standing in front of the Boydell paintings that they were created by men for men. That is not a value judgment. This was the art world of the early 19th C. The subjects, the perspectives, the portrayal of women reflected a specific and limited viewpoint.

In her contemporary pieces, Ansel deliberately disrupts the male thesis. By using color and abstraction in what she calls “open-ended visual languages,” she creates “new ways of looking and engaging for modern viewers.” She is not replacing the original stories. She is showing us different angles, different emotional temperatures.

Like hearing a jazz musician interpret a classical piece, the original composition remains; suddenly revealing notes and rhythms never before noticed. One such piece: Beethoven’s Für Elise as updated and performed by jazz pianist, Chick Corea in 1993.

Looking at the Paintings

The Folger stays true to the original Boydell Shakespeare Gallery tradition by providing visitors free booklets listing each painting denoted with a number. Further in the booklet, the paintings are described by play title, act and scene, a description of the scene’s events, the artist’s name, and excerpts from the play’s text.

In the gallery, I was on my own to view, search and interpret. Without immediate instructional labels, the exhibition affords space for interpretation while the booklet affords greater depth, if desired. Standing before the massive canvas of the awakening woman in white, I felt the folly of the deception and ignorance of the friar. When you look, you can recognize your feelings and reactions to the play. Having deep-seated conflict about that play, I first saw deception then agony. What you see will depend on your attitude.

Digging further into the context of the paintings, I opened the booklet to learn about the artist, the play, and the scene. Who painted this? When? What was happening in their world? How did knowing that painting No.10 was from King Lear affect my view? I did not need the booklet to tell me. I also did not need the booklet for painting No. 8. However, painting No.1 could have been any one of Shakespeare’s female characters dressed in men’s clothing. Painting No. 14 is not a play scene; it is a semi-deification of the Bard himself.

From British Imperialism to You

There is truth embedded in these beautiful paintings. By the time the Boydell Gallery closed in 1805, Shakespeare had become “The Bard.” He was no longer a brilliant playwright, but “a larger-than-life symbol of British imperialism and economic power.” These paintings were not simply representational art. They were essentially cultural propaganda.

Two hundred twenty years later, we appreciate the artistry while acknowledging the intent. Shakespeare’s words have always been interpreted through the lens of whoever is doing the looking—whether that is a Royal Academy painter in 1790 or a contemporary Artist Fellow in 2025.

The Contemporary Conversation Continues

The Folger’s Artist Fellowship program ensures that this conversation does not stop with historical canvases. Current Fellows like Elise Ansel join Missy Dunaway, Dominick Porras, Mandy Cano Villalobos, and Alexander D’Agostino create art works “…grounded in research on the stories, art, and objects in our collection,” per the introductory statement.

These artists are not merely making art about Shakespeare. They are using the collection as a springboard to explore how art and literature shape each other; how visual language can expand or challenge written words, how what we see influences what we think we know.

Come See for Yourself

These are not paintings you can experience on a screen. You should stand before them and feel their scale, see the brushwork up close, and notice details that disappear in photographs: how light plays across Ansel’s textured surfaces, the depth of detail and scope of the Boydell canvases, designed to overwhelm and impress.

The 14 Boydell paintings are now permanent residents at the Folger. The contemporary art rotates with each fellowship. Both are free to visit. Both will make you think about Shakespeare in ways you have not before.

Next time you are near Capitol Hill, visit the collection. Spend some time with witches old and new. See what happens when you allow visual artists to have their say about those famous words.

Shakespeare wrote for theater—a visual, physical space where words created the story. These artists are continuing that tradition, reminding us that these plays are as much visual as they are heard.

The Contemporary Art at the Folger exhibition featuring Elise Ansel runs October 3–November 9, 2025. The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery paintings are on permanent display. The Folger Shakespeare Library is located on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and admission is free.

Posted on in Al Letson, Cultural Commentary, DC Theater, FolgerTheatre, Julius Caesar, JuliusX, lifestyle, Live Theater, Malcom X, Shakespear tragedy, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Adaptation, Shakespeare Plays, Shakespeare Theater, The Front Page of Style, The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, Theater

Julius X – A Triple Treat

Playwright Al Letson PC: Amir Arsalan Shamsabadi on Unsplash Julius X Played by Brandon Carter

Julius X was born from rejection. When Al Letson was not cast as Mark Antony in a Julius Caesar production because of race, he decided, “Screw it, I’m going to write my own.” This was not bravado. It was love. He had fallen for Mark Antony’s speech in 10th grade and read Malcolm X’s autobiography in 7th. Both stayed with him. Years later, he realized Julius Caesar’s arc fit almost perfectly with Malcolm X’s life. This is how a dyslexic kid who learned to read through comics, a flight attendant who competed in poetry slams across America, an award-winning journalist and Shakespearean, spent over two years creating what is now playing at the Folger Theatre through October 26. I discovered Al Letson through Julius X.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is a popular high school literature topic. How it is studied and how Shakespeare is presented often affects students for a lifetime. In Letson’s case, Caesar spoke to him. To others, it was just something to get through to close a chapter on high school English. I too studied Julius Caesar in high school. After my beloved Shakespeare teacher’s drowning the prior summer, I was uninspired to seriously pursue the play, and my new teacher was marking time. All was not lost for me. I read Shakespeare’s entire canon in five months in honor of my inspirational teacher’s 50th anniversary of his drowning and published a blog about him and Shakespeare. That blog remains the most read of all of my blogs. Julius Caesar was, of course, reread. This time with real interest.

In preparing to see Julius X, I opened my books once again. Marjorie Garber’s essay in her book, Shakespeare After All, and Paul Cantor’s Shakespeare and Politics lectures on YouTube helped me prepare. I then researched the life of Malcolm X. As a child, I remember hearing my parents discussing his assassination on the day it happened. The parallels between the two men are remarkable. Yes, they were different, however, their passion, their vision, and their boldness are indisputable.

Al Letson so aptly married the two tragic heroes by meeting their arcs, their mission, their loyalty, and their fire. Having prepared, I was happy to feel like a participant rather than a spectator. I felt the rhythm of the verses, the drive of the characters, the commitment to community of the friends, and the loving fear of the wives. Sitting close to the stage, I saw facial expressions shift with each revelation – what performers call rubber faces, the ability to communicate entire thoughts through the smallest movement. The wives were remarkable: Julius’s wife in her impeccable teal suit with braid detailing, Portia animated and desperate, both showing love and intuition that their husbands would not, could not, hear. Julius X is fast paced. There is no time to wallow or worry. Things happen quickly, and while the interpretation is impressive and surprising, being prepared was key to my Julius X journey.  I was enthralled rather than bewildered.

Harlem of the 1960s was not Rome. Rome was regal, authoritative, imperial. But Harlem was home—brownstones and street corners, community and belonging. Its residents cannot live in Harlem without loving it. Harlem was Malcolm X’s ‘Rome.’  It was intimate, not monumental. It was his world. He had a burning passion. He wanted more for himself, his family, and his people. A militant who reconsidered his path but never abandoned his passion posed a threat to his supporters. The key? Ambition.

Caesar is a pivotal character. He has been compared to Alexander the Great by Plutarch in his biographies, Parallel Lives, in approximately 110 AD, to being featured by Shakespeare in the Tragedy of Julius Caesar in 1599, to being analyzed by Paul Cantor in the 21st century, juxtaposing him between Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, and now, to being reimagined as Julius X by Letson in the 2020s. Almost 2000 years have passed. There is nothing new under the sun. Ambition is considered threatening by those with opposing vision or small thinking.

Julius X is entertaining, thought provoking, classic, and unapologetically bold. Playing through October 26 at the Folger Theatre, it rewards preparation and challenges assumptions. Good that Letson was not pigeonholed as Mark Antony. You can buy tickets now.

All photo credits: Erika Nizborski and Brittany Diliberto.