When it comes to getting down on Elon Musk, I was ahead of the curve. Back in October, before Trump’s second election, before DOGE, below Elon let his four-year-old son prance around the oval office, I decried the Cybertrucks that littered my neighborhood. Armored vehicles have no place in a society that proclaims to be civilized.
Now, of course, the whole world is recoiling from Elon’s shenanigans, and Tesla owners of all stripes are embarrassed by their contributions to this man’s bloated profits. Some sport bumper stickers asserting, “I Bought this Tesla before Elon Went Nuts,” as if petitioning for absolution. Some protest at Tesla dealerships, which our current administration considers a treasonous crime unlike, say, storming the Capitol. But this week I saw a new twist on Tesla owners trying to distance themselves from gravity of their purchase.
There’s a new angular monstrosity in my neighborhood, which its owner has camouflaged in a new way. They covered it with stick-on daisies. Yes, they put $3.99 daisy stickers all over their $80k+ truck. We’re talking serious lipstick on a pig. I have to give them kudos for making a ludicrous vehicle look even more ridiculous.
But I can already see, when the lipstick wears off, and the stickers peel away from the Cybertruck’s notoriously precious body, the shadows that will remain where flowers once clung. Which begs the question Pete Seeger asked seventy years ago:
I walked to the gym the other day, a pleasant walk of 1-1/2 miles or so along residential streets. I counted eleven houses under renovation. Not just homeowners getting a new furnace, landscaping, or applying coat of paint. Major renovations, many of them gut jobs. This phenomenal amount of construction activity speaks of the spring weather. But also, in this time of economic uncertainty and looming recession, to the peculiar and fortunate nature of Cambridge.
A hundred years ago, Cambridge was another Massachusetts industrial town. The home base of Lever Brothers soap and lots of candy manufacturers. Squirrel Brand. Necco wafers. Haviland thin mints. Cambridge whipped up all sorts of sweets. Sure, Harvard was always here and MIT arrived in 1916, so there was the pointy-headed element. But working-class folks far outnumbered academics.
World War II came and went. MIT became a scientific juggernaut. Harvard became the pinnacle of collegiate cache. But Cambridge itself remained doughty. American culture was enamoured by the suburban shift out of the gritty city, and the disincentives of rent control kept housing stock border-line dilapidated. In the 1960’s, an intrepid urbanite could pick up a 2- or 3-family house in Cambridge for ten grand. Maybe less.
In the 1990’s, rent control got the boot, city living became cool again, and housing prices started to climb. Fast. That acceleration continues, independent of dot.com bust, Great Recession, or Trumpian panic. So many more people want to live in Cambridge than our seven-square miles can contain. Especially since Harvard and MIT—the reason so many folks want to live here—own 20% of the city.
Today, just under 120,000 people live in Cambridge’s 60,000 residential units. 8,600 of them are permanently affordable in some way. The rest is very pricey real estate. Which is both a point of pride and an issue of concern.
No matter how one defines, “progressive” Cambridge covets the title. The city fancies itself having an outsize influence on the rest of the world. Therefore, it’s all well and good that Cambridge is such a great place to life that people are willing to pay up to $1000 per square foot to own a piece of it. But it’s embarrassing that Cambridge has become a poster child for how real estate prices highlight society’s inequalities. Aside from the 8,600 low- and moderate-income families who live in the city, and a smattering of old timers who hand their houses down to their kids, the rest of us are basically rich. House rich, at the very least.
Last month the Cambridge City Council adopted the most “progressive” zoning in the US. I set off the term in quotes because a hundred years ago, when zoning was implemented throughout much of the US, so-called progressive zoning partitioned our cities into discrete areas of density and function, whereas today, progressive zoning means just the opposite. Cambridge got rid of one- two- and three- family zoning designations and allows, by right, anyone to build up to a four-story residential building (six stories if the lot is over 5000 square feet and the units are 100% affordable.) There are some set-back and open space parameters, but no parking requirements. In theory, this will stimulate residential development, supply will increase, maybe even prices will float down. In fact, the new zoning will create at least some more affordable housing (there’s a 20% affordable requirement for any projects over 10 units) and likely a lot more private housing. I’m in favor this change because, as a city blessed with excellent infrastructure and oodles of jobs, making Cambridge denser, more pedestrian, is the sustainable thing to do.
Today, I walk along our city streets and see lots of money poured into top tier residences. The question remains: what kind of construction will we see two years from now? Will the new zoning code create enough incentive to alter the exclusive nature of Cambridge’s private housing stock, or will we just continue to get more high-end projects? Will incentives be enough for builders to tear down our traditional 2- and 3- family houses and replace them with small apartment buildings? Will developers aggregate lots and build even larger buildings? We don’t know.
One thing that I know for sure. Zoning notwithstanding, there will still be lots of construction in Cambridge. The place is too desirable to stand still.
Yoni Appelbaum’s cover story, “Stuck in Place,” in the March 2025 issue of The Atlantic offers a unique thesis as to the fundamental rumblings of our national discontent. That we used to be a society on the move. And now we are not. And that is a problem.
Mr. Appelbaum takes the long view on relocation, all the way back to the one of our guiding national principles: that people came to the United States to escape the rigid hierarchy of wherever they came from, and part of that hierarchy was physical entrapment within the confines of a parochial village. The author describes with glee the nineteenth century American tradition of Moving Day, an unofficial holiday whose date varied by locale, when up to one in five people in any given metropolis switched houses. Most people were renters, who, according to Appelbaum, treated their domiciles then as we treat our cars and cellphones today–consumable items with a constant eye towards an upgrade. He delights in the piles of belongs stacked on streets, profiteering moving men, and the haste required to get out by noon, for there’s a fresh tenant fast on your heels. A giant frenzy of American energy. Personally, I can’t imagine it was all that much fun.
This constant moving was enabled by having a large, relatively affordable, range of housing options in most places were people wanted to live. Another manifestation of resource-generous America. Developers built and the people came. Places got shabby and folks moved on. One striver’s shabby became the incoming immigrant’s dream come true. When a place got entirely too shabby, the owner would tear it down and build anew, usually bigger, taller, denser. Thus our cities grew in a piecemeal fashion.
As did our sense of community. Nineteenth and early 20th century America represented a different kind of community. One based in interest and opportunity rather than heredity. We were a nation where the term ‘stranger’ evolved from someone from beyond, who ought to be feared; to someone new, who is likely interesting.
This idea of constant movement slowed during the 20th century, though it’s spirt remained in our mid-century exodus to the suburbs and our continually creeping West. What brought it to a halt, according to Appelbaum, was Progressives. And the particular example he uses is that heroine of urban salvation: Jane Jacobs.
Before Jane Jacobs wrote her seminal, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she and her architect husband purchased a townhouse in Manhattan’s West Village, removed the storefront on the first floor, and turned it into a single-family residence. Thus, they both diminished street activity and reduced the number of people living in that space. Nevertheless, they proceeded to make their names championing a kind of dense, pedestrian, street-focused urbanity that their own renovation helped dissipate. They staved off urban renewal and installed zoning, preservation, and other restrictions that discouraged change. They fossilized the neighborhood.
As the “character” of places became important, the affluent enjoyed legal mechanisms to “preserve” their environs. New forms of segregation ensued. Thus today, when less than one in thirteen people move in any given year, we’re an economically stratified nation with woefully inadequate housing stock that continues to reinforce the ‘haves’ and keep out the “have nots.”
According to Appelbaum, we need three million more housing units in our country, and they need to be where people want to live: i.e. big cities. On our current track, we’ll never get there.
I love the idea behind Mr. Appelbaum’s thesis. I appreciate his novel perspective on our national argument with ourselves. I can understand that what he describes is part of our discontent. But I cannot agree it is our foundational problem.
First, we have become a nation of home owners, rather than a nation of renters. This certainly impacts our mobility, and yet I believe most would agree, this is a good thing. Having ‘skin in the game’ makes homeowners less likely to move, and arguably more conservative. We have a stake in preservation over change. I am not convinced that’s all bad.
Second, Mr. Appelbaum doesn’t even give lip service to the ecological implication of adding three million more residences in the United States. In fact, he does not weigh the environmental costs of endless relocation at all. This is surprising to read in The Atlantic, a publication that prides itself on environmental awareness.
Still, the article is valuable and compelling. The pendulum in favor of neighborhood conservation as a euphonism for elitism (i.e. racism) has swung too far. We need more, denser, development in areas where humans have already claimed prominence over nature, and we need to leave areas we have yet to spoil completely alone. Equally important, we need to check our thirst for more space, more privacy. We need to develop new forms of housing, congregate forms, in which we learn how to share both space and resources. Where we build community by living in it.
CROWNS is great theater, great energy, great community. CROWNS is simply great.
We entered into the black box hush of Arrow St. Arts in Cambridge on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. The theater had become a church, with an arc of seats facing a raised alter. We found our places, picked up our handheld fans with the photo of Matin Luther King Jr. (other congregants got Michelle Obama). We thumbed through the ‘Hymnal’ of lyrics to well-known Gospel songs. The audience trickled in. Mostly women, mostly Black, all better dressed than me and my companion. No matter. The space had a convivial vibe. We chatted. I told my neighbor we were in for a treat, as I’d seen this show twenty years ago at Lyric Stage Boston. She told me she owned 185 hats. Explained how each had special meaning. And tricky storge requirements.
The theater grew dark. From all directions came women, big women, powerful women, in brilliant African attire and elaborate head wraps, chanting loud and clear and strong. The forebearers in their crowns.
The plot of CROWNS is simple. Teenage Yolanda is Brooklyn born and raised. Her mother sends her to stay with her grandmother, “down South” after Yolanda’s brother is needlessly, violently killed. Grandmother is an old school, Bible-church-lady who wears a hat—a glorious hat—every Sunday. You can see where this is going: Yolanda bucks her newfound place until she embraces it. Thus, playwright Regina Taylor spends little time on plot, and devotes most of her energy to the glory of the Crowns.
Besides Grandma Em, there are four other church ladies, each with a slightly different take on the whys and wherefores of Black woman and their church-on-Sunday hats. There’s also a man—only one—who handles the task of being every man. Most often a good man; sometimes not.
Kaedon Grey and Janelle Grace. Photo by Chelcy Garrett
CROWNS is a pageant of pride. Of these women’s connection to their hats and their god. And their work in the fields, and their work in the home, and their work for their families and their struggle for rights and their place in this world. It’s beautiful and inspiring and funny, and a visual delight. E. Rosser’s costumes and the fabulous hats are a Spring-spectacular of purples and yellows and reds and blues. Regine Vital’s flawless direction keeps our eyes ever focused on what really matters on stage.
CROWNS takes its religious roots seriously, with ample room for humor. I loved when the altar was transformed into Grandma’s dressing table, and we watched her put on her best face for the Lord, before going to see the Lord. Later, the altar bears solemn weight as eulogy after eulogy, the hat of someone dear…important…loved marks their passage to their maker.
On a dismal Sunday afternoon we came together. We sang, we clapped, we stomped, we fanned. We praised these wonderful women and their spectacular crowns. We left refreshed, inspired, brimming in fellowship and good feeling. Isn’t that what church—and theater—is supposed to do?
Evelyn Howe, Jessica Pimentel, and Yesenia Iglesias. All photos by Marc J. Franklin
It’s a challenge to convey the full power of Don’t Eat the Mangos without spoilers, but just like the juicy fruit that, hanging too ripe for too long, falls rotting on the ground outside this Puerto Rican house, I will keep the play’s sweetness and secrets buried under tough skin. Mangos is billed as a tragicomedy: a domestic tale of three grown sisters and their aging, ailing parents. That’s misleading. Don’t Eat the Mangos is a comitragicomedy because it comes full circle. From a starting point of hilarity it descends into a place dark beyond comprehension, and then the comedy reemerges to offer at least a nubbin of hope.
The play is delivered in about 20/80 Spanish to English which, for unilingual brains like mine, presents a challenge in understanding that required me to sit up and take notice. I sorta kinda figured that whatever was uttered in Spanish could be understood by onstage action and whatever English followed, but I was never quite confident of full comprehension. Which I decided is the point in a play whose seeds of horror are ever present, rumbling beneath the tropical levity. We descend into hell while we’re still chuckling.
The duality of comedy and tragedy bullseyes when the mother asks her oldest daughter, stalled in life in so many ways, “Are you dead, or are you about to wake up?” We, the audience, hopes for the latter, even as we brace for the former.
Jessica Pimentel and Susanna Guzmán
Don’t Eat The Mangos is a very specific play. The Huntington’s astonishing set is a very specific house in a very specific place. The house is a major character in the play. Rotating slowly, its warm light pulls us into its stifling secrets.
Evelyn Howe is a standout as Wicha, the youngest sister, though the entire ensemble is effective. Each character knows, or suspects, what’s buried beneath the mango tree, and each gives particular voice to their perspective. By plays end, the array of shame and blame and complicity with the family’s secret is so superbly woven, we can find in each member a reflection of people we know, perhaps even love. And we discover empathy for (almost) every one of them.
Which is how Mangos, in its insistent specificity, unspools a universal story. One that, unfortunately, could be told of any culture, any faith, most any family in our world.
Go see Don’t Eat the Mangos. You will laugh. You will be unnerved. You will leave with deep, unsettling questions. But the food for thought will be so sweet.
Twenty years ago this month I took my first yoga class. A friend took me to a men’s naked yoga class in a third-floor walk-up above Teddy Shoes in Central Square. I attended weekly for a year or so, until one evening a new guy with incredible form invited me to Bikram hot yoga.
One class and I was hooked on my first and only addiction. I practiced yoga six, seven days a week for four years. Over a thousand 90-minute classes at 110 degrees. I woke at 5:30 every morning to practice before work. When people asked, “Where do you find the time to do so much yoga?” I replied, “I don’t have enough time not to do it.” Looking back, all of those hours in the hot room merge into a unified fusion of struggle and satisfaction; body and mind. I never felt better in my life, loose and light and full of energy. Like all zealots, I had to share my good news. Thus, the birth of this blog.
Eventually, like all addictions, Bikram proved to be both too much and not enough. I started exploring other forms: Iyengar, Ashtanga, restorative. I cut back to four, maybe five classes a week. I took up sculpt, which purists pooh-pooh as Americanized exercise.
After I retired, in 2014, I took yoga teacher training, and for a brief period, I taught. At the men’s class where I first learned. At the Cambridge Y. I invited small groups of middle-aged men to my place; guys too self-conscious of our girth and sag to frequent upscale studios so often tilted towards lithe young women. My favorite teaching gigs were one-on-one sessions with older men suffering Parkinson’s. The deep coordination and repetition inherent in yoga cannot cure Parkinson’s, but it slows its progression.
Susan LoPiccolo at Down Under On Demand
All of that came to a halt when I took on months of bike riding. Many would not consider pedaling fifty miles a day as yoga. But it was for me. Hours of meditation on the shoulder of the road aligned my momentum and balance surely as any asanas.
When I returned to Cambridge in late 2016 I dabbled with every aspect of my life. A variety of yogas, but I also joined a gym, and found new focus in walking. Yoga became but one ingredient in my recipe for fitness and well-being.
Then COVID arrived and everything stopped. There were no places to go; no classes to attend. I walked and walked and walked. Until we all became Zoom literate and everyone started streaming everything and yoga studios, like everything else, started creating content. I joined Down Under On Demand, which is where I practice still, alternating virtual yoga with in-person gym days. I’m not sure how easy it is for beginners to learn yoga online, but online yoga provides me enough structure of an in-person class that my mind releases while my body mindlessly, mindfully, goes through the motions.
Braxton Rose at Down Under On Demand
For most of my life I’ve looked my age; felt it too. These days, people often underestimate my age. I feel mighty good, prescription-free, healthier than most anyone I know pushing seventy. I credit my graceful aging (so far) to yoga.
Who knows how my practice will evolve. The time may come when the body demands that sculpt yield to restorative. If I’m lucky, there’ll be chair yoga in my future. No worry. It’s all yoga. It’s all good.
I know it’s not fashionable to compliment or praise, but fashion’s never been my forte, so I’m going to go out on limb. The MBTA is getting better. The trains and buses are running more regularly, the slowdowns have slowed down, the operators are nicer, more people are riding the T.
The T hit is nadir after the pandemic, when people ought to have started to come back, but pretty much refused. There were so many slow zones on the subways you’d sit and sit in the tunnels without any notion when movement would occur. There was a shortage of bus drivers, so sometimes they’d simply skip a scheduled trip. No warning. Tough luck. The Boston Globe featured stories of MBTA execs who didn’t even live in Massachusetts, yet alone ever set foot on a subway platform. Worse became worst when the Green Line extension to Somerville opened, only to reveal that the tracks were installed at the wrong width, and the trolley cars would derail above, say, three miles per hour. Social media was full of clips of pedestrians outdistancing the trains.
I still rode the T—in bad weather—but took precautions that would be unwieldy for a regular commuter. When I used to figure 45 minutes to bus/subway downtown, I left an hour and a half. Sometimes I would arrive at my destination way, way, early, but all too often it took that full amount of time to traverse the six miles from my house to Park Street.
In an era when we all understand (even if we don’t all like to admit) that we need to be driving cars less and taking public transit more, the gruesome reality of riding the T sent more and more people into their cars. More than a year after pandemic closures, T ridership was limp. I would take a mid-day commuter train out to Worcester and pass empty parking lots at every station. The system was broken.
Then, a few heads rolled. Phillip Eng became General Manager. He made sincere apologies and established attainable targets for improvement. We endured shuttle buses for months on end as they fixed deteriorated tracks in subway tunnels. He provided incentives to get more bus drivers. And slowly but steadily, things improved. We’re not done. On any given weekend, there are still portions of the system that are closed. But we are so far along.
The media, of course, is still quick to highlight every deficiency. Recently, a train accident at Union Square required five people go to the hospital to be evaluated. All were fine, but it was first page news. When would they ever going to report such minimal injuries from automobile crashes, which happen with much more frequency?
Nevertheless, I have returned to my old habits. It only takes me 45 minutes to get downtown these days. Reliably. Predictably. There are more people on the trains and buses, and they make for just as good people-watching as ever.
Vincent Randazzo and Avanthika Srinivasan in The Triumph of Love. Photo by Liza Voll.
The Triumph of Love at The Huntington
By Pierre Carlet de Chamberlain de Marivaux
Adapted by Stephen Wadsworth
Directed by Loretta Greco
March 7, 2025 – April 6, 2025
Marianna Bassham and Nael Nacer. Photo by Liza Voll.
If you’ve got whiplash from life in these United States these days, maybe it’s time to dial back a few hundred years and let your head clear on an elegant swing in a beautiful country garden. Forget the trivial differences loitering among us these days, and tackle the existential issues of rationality versus romance. Give in to pure indulgence and give yourself over to The Triumph of Love.
The Triumph of Love is an Eighteenth-Century play by Pierre Carlet de Chamberlain de Marivaux that premiered at the Comédie Italienne in 1732. If you’re like me, your working knowledge of French theater begins and ends with Molière and the Comédie Francaise. Marivaux came later, and he favored the rival Italienne troupe, which premiered most of his thirty+ plays. Marivaux’s satire is less biting than Moliere’s, but his social insights are keen and his humor is, well, meveilleux! Especially in Stephen Wadsworth’s wonderful adaptation.
The plot is pure, juicy fantasy. Léonide, princess of some Duchy or other, gained the throne after her grandparents killed off the rightful king and claimed the crown. In short, she is illegitimate, though through no fault of her own. Agis, the rightful heir, was snatched away as a baby and has been raised by Hermocrate, a Philosopher of the Rational, who is secluded away in his gorgeous garden with his step-sister Léontine, where they’ve raised the rightful heir, now grown to a strapping Adonis, to distain any stirrings of the heart.
Léonide once viewed Agis in a wood and fell instantly in love with him. But she knows that he hates her from afar—after all she sits on the throne that should be his own. So what does she do? This being an Eighteenth-Century comedy of errors, she dresses as a man and weasels her way into the garden to try to win his heart before fully revealing herself. Every duplicity requires more duplicity, and in short order all rationality evaporates as Léontine falls in love with Léonide, the man; Hermocrate falls in love with Léonide, the woman. Agis, ever sheltered, seems ready to burst his heart open to pretty much anyone. To marinate the plot twists and general hijinks, toss in a hysterical Harlequin, a sage though word-muddling gardener, and Léonide’s faithful servant Corine (also in pants).
The set is gorgeous, the lighting sublime, and the cast is uniformly enchanting. Marianna Bassham, a perennial Boston theater favorite, is a stand-out as Léontine, in a dress so stiff she moves like a cut-out doll rigid as her Rationality, until she completely falls for love and scampers about in her opulent layers.
Go see The Triumph of Love. First, for the belly laughs. Then, to savor the joys of love that linger long afterward.
If you’re in the mood for a journalistic dive into why we Americans—so long-lived on the top of the socioeconomic heap—are in such a tangle of anger and division, I recommend Derek Thompson’s cover story in the February 2025 edition of The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century.” As if it’s not bad enough that we’re likely screwed by nuclear war or environmental devastation, viral resistance or End Times revelations, it seems we may simply do ourselves in by being the most self-serving, narcissistic, inward-focused creatures this planet has every tolerated. And we’re getting worse.
I have long subscribed to the theorem that what we buy with our affluence is privacy. Mr. Thompson’s article reinforces our preference for privacy over interaction at every possible opportunity. Since the 1980’s, by every measure, we spend more time alone, at home, on our devices. The trend spiked during the pandemic, but has not abated since we’ve had the ‘all clear’ to breath collectively again. Accordingly, we enjoy/endure less face-to-face time than ever. We are less and less content, let alone happy. And yet we do basically nothing to break out of our isolation.
The article is rich in amusing factoids, like the way many restaurants have repurposed bars (formerly places of communal gathering) into take-out delivery counters as their take-out business explodes in direct proportion to the shrinking numbers in their dining rooms. To be fair, Mr. Thompson points out some positive aspects of our solitary existences. How our devices actually make connections among core family and friends deeper, more continuous. And how those devises also enable us to find affinity groups, no matter how esoteric. But on the whole, “The Anti-Social Century” is pretty much 2000’s Bowling Alone updated in accordance with the worst possible scenario.
The stats are gruesome, the outlook bleak, but I did find one potentially useful nugget. Not so much a germ of hope as a framework for understanding our increasingly isolated society. After all, the better we understand a phenomenon, the better positioned we are to address it.
Marc Dunkleman, author and professor, describes our social world as three rings. The inner ring is our family and close friends. Our ring of intimacy. It is where we learn love. The outer ring is our tribe. It’s where we find broad commonalties. Where we learn loyalty. Each of these rings is affected by our physical isolation and device-dependence, but they can still flourish.
The middle ring is the village: our neighbor; our PTA; our children’s little league team; our local church; our veteran’s group. It is the people who are physically proximate, yet not intimates. Folks we knew in abundance a hundred years ago, during the heyday of American civic organizations. But in our era of spiraling downward engagement in any kind of localized group activity, the village is the most frayed remnant of social fabric.
Since we live in a world where physical connection is less and less important, why do we care if the village gets lost? Because of the most fleeting quality that Dunkleman attributes to the social ring of the village. Tolerance. In the old days, we had to get along with the people near us. We needed to be able to depend on them (at the very least in emergencies), and so we learned how to hold our tongue, muffle our opinions, cool our jets. Because it was more important to get along with our neighbor, than to agree with them.
Way back, when Hillary Clinton was First Lady, and her biggest faults were whether to claim “Rodman” in her name or channel Tammy Wynette in, “Stand By Your Man,” Ms. Clinton wrote a book, “It Takes a Village.” A bit of pop philosophy every bit as cheesy and as it is true.
It takes a village to support human life, to learn the kind of ‘give along to get along’ cooperation that brought us to the apex of the food chain in the first place. And if we keep disregarding the qualities that make up a village: mutual tolerance, respect, forbearance; our humanity is doomed.
Three long-time friends come to blows—perhaps—when one of them purchases a quite expensive piece of abstract art. ART is not for everyone. It’s got a peculiar plot. It’s a play of talk, more talk, and redundant talk. It’s white-on-white canvas triggers insecurities and prompts altogether too much relationship discourse. It’s a bit of Becket’s aimlessness, a bit of Ionesco’s absurdity, a bit of preciousness only the privileged can indulge. But the language is so delicious, so entrancing, that all can be excused. After all, these are not American men, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a bar, watching some sport on a screen. These are Frenchmen. Thus we savor how they dissect themselves and their purpose and their entanglements with the same precision of teenage girls everywhere.
ART premiered in Paris in 1994, and subsequently played in London, New York, and all over the world. It’s won Moliere’s and Olivier’s and Tony’s. It’s been translated into twenty languages. It’s a contemporary masterpiece. And this production delivers all of ART’s strengths with gusto.
The set, of course, is white and spare. The men’s clothes, of course, are muted. The lighting is alternately too vague and too bright. But the acting is consistently brilliant. Remo Airaldi, Michael Kaye, and John Kuntz are three of Boston’s finest actors; each of them in full flame. The audience sits transfixed for ninety minutes as three humans try to understand themselves and their interconnections to a remarkable depth. When it’s over we are enriched in the potential and complexity of human coexistence. Then we step into our world, where everything is siloed into digestible, mostly inaccurate sound bites. And we crave ART.
Parker Jennings as Hedda Gabler. Photo courtesy of Apollinaire Theatre
Hedda Gabler
Playwright: Henrik Ibsen
Director: Danielle Fauteux Jacques
Apollinaire Theatre
February 21- March 16, 2025
Paola Ferrer and Conall Sahler. Photo courtesy of Apollinaire Theatre
If you’re hankering for a truly timeless classic, find your way into the labyrinth of angled streets known as Chelsea, climb two hefty flights up into the former Odd Fellows Hall, and enter into the candlelit shadows of Apollinaire Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler. I’ve seen enough Ibsen to know this would be no lark in the park, but I was amazed anew at Ibsen’s insights into contemporary life. When he wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, Ibsen allowed heroine Nora to escape her stifling life, albeit at great cost. By the time Hedda comes along in 1890, she enjoys no such luck. Bored. Bursting with undirected energy. Bored. Dismissed by all except for her looks and charm. Bored. Hedda has nothing to look forward to and so—well-known spoiler alert—she takes an early exit.
Apollinaire’s production is exquisite. The set, the costumes, the pacing are all dignified, elegant, and constricting. Parker Jennings, as Hedda, lets loose only a few times, and only when no one is present to see her frustration. Conell Sahler as her devoted, dithering husband is terrific. Paola Ferrer as Aunt Julianna is crisply clueless of her baffling new niece.
In 2025, Hedda Gabler is more than theater. It’s a cautionary tale. As our society slides backwards, and intimations of A Handmaids Tale feel uncomfortably close, god forbid we return to the skewered perspectives of Victorian Europe that Ibsen so keenly dissects.
The Awkward Pose 