High Fidelity

Finally, it is Prior’s chosen time period that links his work with such stage musicals as Charles Busch‘s Psycho Beach Party and John Waters’ Hairspray (which opens next year on Broadway), as well as a sexio-political comedy such as Doug Field‘s Down South, which premiered in L.A. this spring and which, like Speed-Hedda, swims in a boozy haze of Latin cocktail-hour music. The early 1960s presents these happy campers with an inviting frontier to explore, for besides forming a borderland where the twilight of Eisenhower puritanism met the dawn of love-generation experimentation, these years also saw the last vestiges of the girdle-and-glove formality so essential to the drag aesthetic. This bouffanted epoch offers Prior a psychological ecology in which not only Hedda but America itself seems torn between moral correctness and libidinous chaos, teetering on the edge of repression and impulse. In other words, Prior places his farce in a time in which people could still be embarrassed.

Even though, as mentioned earlier, we may be certain about what Speed-Hedda isn’t -- and may enjoy it for just that -- we don‘t necessarily know what it represents beyond a clever camp outing, a problem that may rest with the show’s antagonist. Hedda Gabler, after all, is a more problematic figure than Nora Helmer of Ibsen‘s A Doll’s House because of her rather cruel and selfish personality. Whereas Nora‘s revolt against husband and family can be comfortably converted into the terms of modern liberalism, Hedda’s actions are more the impulses of a hedonist than of a feminist, making our embrace of her tentative at best. Whenever our eyes connect that missing manuscript of Loevborg‘s unpublished book with the Tesmans’ fireplace (at least, in traditional stagings of Hedda Gabler), something kicks inside our stomachs and we begin to turn against Hedda, for she is no longer a threatening ”castrator“ but a potential infanticide, as Loevborg‘s maternal descriptions of his lost work imply.

Nevertheless, Speed-Hedda is a dark, funny and intelligent work whose mood swings approximate those of its fated heroine. The serious side of Prior’s effort arrives at the very end, when, after Hedda has made a shocking decision, the hi-fi‘s turntable gets stuck repeatedly playing a single word from Camelot’s ”If Ever I Would Leave You,“ and suddenly the moment shifts from Hedda Gabler to Ibsen‘s Ghosts, from Hedda to Oswald -- a moment of unbearable melancholy in which the two can be seen as brother and sister.