‘Further Adventures’ mines farce from tragedy

When other modern playwrights get a look at Jeff Whitty’s “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler,” now enjoying its world premiere at South Coast Repertory, they’ll more than likely kick themselves for not hitting on this idea first.

After all, the characters already are in place -- most of them, anyway, created by long-departed playwrights and novelists. What Whitty has done, and done most brilliantly, is assume the role of puppeteer for his farcical fable, using these familiar figures as pawns in a literary chess game.

He’s assuming something else as well -- that these borrowed characters are quite dissatisfied with their fates at the hands of their creators and would like nothing more than to “change” (that word crops up quite frequently in Whitty’s script). And you hardly can blame them -- after all, the title character commits suicide at the end of the Ibsen play from which she is lifted.

Poor Hedda can’t catch a break. She’s fated either to do herself in with a pistol or die of boredom with her nerdish husband, George, while pining for the real love of her life, Eilert. But Whitty has assigned her to a sort of parallel universe, populated by literary characters who live on as long as they remain in people’s memories. And Hedda is not easily forgotten.

Neither is Mammy, the black slave/servant made illustrious by Hattie McDaniel in her Oscar-winning role from “Gone With the Wind” (that title is never mentioned, but there’s little doubt of her genesis). She’s still waiting on others and yearning to alter her lifestyle as well, if only she had the means or the courage.

“Further Adventures” casts the spotlight on Susannah Schulman, acting up a storm as Hedda without fear of recrimination for overindulgence, this being the broadest of comic genres. And Schulman assuredly is up to the task, tearing into her melodramatic character with a vengeance as she searches fervently for a better way of life ... er, death.

Schulman requires all of her performing chops to keep the spotlight from shifting over to Kimberly Scott as Mammy, who steals her scenes with subtlety and subservience. Whitty generously affords Scott an opportunity to experience what she might have become had she been born, or created, a century later.

Christopher Liam Moore tiptoes through the role of George Tesman, Hedda’s ineffective husband, with the understated skills of a latter-day Wally Cox. Kate A. Mulligan revels in a variety of characters, the most memorable being a bloodstained Medea, and lends valuable support to Whitty’s off-the-wall creative concept.

A pair of screaming queens apparently plucked straight out of “The Boys in the Band” are interpreted with flair and gusto by Dan Butler and Patrick Kerr, who arrive late on the scene but figure prominently in the story line. Bahni Turpin struts her stuff with vibrant enthusiasm as a Josephine Baker type, while Preston Maybank assumes the deadpan guise of Hedda’s long-lost lover.

The “guest list” goes on and on in this strange purgatory, which isn’t restricted to fictional characters. Even Jesus (four of them, in fact, including the one from “Godspell”) makes an appearance, ferrying our heroine across a stream (but drawing the line at performing the same service for the rather corpulent Mammy).

Director Bill Rauch gleefully amps up the performance levels of this anything-goes farce, assisted by Christopher Acebo’s imaginative settings and Geoff Korf’s assertive lighting design. Shigeru Yaji’s often-outrageous costumes and Paul James Prendergast’s original score and sound design place the required exclamation points on the production.

“The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler,” a play commissioned and developed by South Coast Repertory, has drawn an abbreviated schedule, playing only through Jan. 29 on the repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage. Playgoers, especially those with a literary background, should avail themselves of the opportunity to experience something completely different -- and hilarious.

* TOM TITUS reviews local theater for the Daily Pilot. His reviews appear Fridays.

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