The Wild Duck

"My heart started breaking at 9:45 last night, a little more than two hours into Great Lakes Theater Festival's THE WILD DUCK, breaking for a once-happy family sucked down into the depths. It may take a while to get there as Ibsen marches deliberately and unswervingly toward the precipice, but your heart too is in for an exhausting but enlightening workout... Written in 1884, this Norwegian masterpiece could hardly be more at home in the United States in 2000. It is a play about destructively false idealism that leads to self-righteous campaigns against human foibles. It could easily be about Kenneth Starr. Translator and adaptor Anthony Clarvoe [has] chosen to update the language and to set the play in the Cleveland of today... Except for the Americanization of names and a few almost invisible trims, Clarvoe's is a remarkably faithful update." Tony Brown, Cleveland Plain Dealer