Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck is about Gregers Werle (Alexander Hurt), the son of a wealthy merchant, Håkon Werle (Robert Stanton).  Gregers idolizes his contemporary Hjalmar Ekdal (Nick Westrate), whose father was Håkon’s business partner until Old Ekdal (David Patrick Kelly) was sent to prison for felling trees on government land.  It is assumed but mostly unspoken that Håkon was guilty and sacrificed Ekdal to ensure his own acquittal.  In any case, none of this seems to bother Gregers, whose concerns are less pecuniary.  He is an idealist, and when he learns secret, unpleasant details about Hjalmar’s wife, he shares the knowledge with his, for lack of a better word, friend.  For Gregers, who is unmarried, a “true marriage” cannot be built on such secrets and illusions.  When asked if he has ever seen a “true marriage,” he responds, without self-reflection, that he has not.

The Wild Duck is an interesting play from an author who spent a career telling people what to think and how to liberate themselves from their self-made traps.  An Enemy of the People, which has been revived twice on Broadway in the last fifteen years, is about a righteous man lecturing hypocrites.  (And considering its subject, public health, it is no doubt due for another.)  In contrast, The Wild Duck suggests the idealistic preacher is ignoring his own mendacity—in this case, the sexual, financial, and moral crimes of his family.  The play offers the same message as The Iceman Cometh, here courtesy of a doctor (Matthew Saldívar): “If you take the life lie from an ordinary man then you take away his happiness as well.”

The current revival by Theatre for a New Audience does full justice to The Wild Duck.  Hurt’s performance is reserved, his voice soft, and there is something both funnier and more infuriating about a calm zealot, one who does not rise to the emotional chaos he creates in a room.  Something more sinister, too: he is lit so that his eyes are always cast in shadow.  The adaptation by David Eldridge is faithful to the original but also trims where appropriate (he removes a minor character, a downstairs boarder).  Eldridge and Simon Godwin, the director, have found a good amount of humor in the material, which helps shade the inevitable, Ibsenian tragedy. A successful production of a challenging play.

The Wild Duck runs through September 28th at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.  262 Ashland Place  Brooklyn, NY.  2 hours 25 minutes.  One intermission.