From left, Colette Girardin ’16 of East Moriches, N.Y., plays Elizabeth Robins and Hanna Allerton ’15 of New York City portrays Marion Lea in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ production of “The Summer in Gossensass.” The performance is part of a senior thesis project for Allerton. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College presents The Summer in Gossensass, a meta-theatrical comedy about the first English-language production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, in performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Oct. 30-31, and Monday, Nov. 3; 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2. The venue is Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St.

This play about creating a play was written by Maria Irene Fornes, and the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ production is directed by Assistant Professor of Theater Brooke O’Harra. Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for students and seniors, available at . For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

The play is inspired by a real moment in history. In the early 1890s, American actresses Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea discovered the work of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and dedicated themselves to producing Hedda Gabler in English.

Brooke O’Harra, assistant professor of theater, directs “The Summer in Gossensass.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

They were particularly fascinated with the complicated title character. Hedda Gabler, written in 1891, tells the story of a woman grappling for meaning and a sense of power within an unhappy marriage. The character of Hedda is one of the first complex and well-developed female characters in theater.

But where Hedda is seeking a path through her circumstances, the characters in Gossensass are seeking a path into the character of Hedda. Fornes’ play, says O’Harra, is meta-theatrical. “It’s an analysis of character in theater and what you do to embody a person.”

Fornes “is constantly using this historical moment to explore the process of analyzing a play — and the desire to make a play.”

Named for the place in Norway where Ibsen met the woman who inspired the Hedda character, Gossensass imagines how the collaboration between Robins and Lea may have unfolded. Throughout the play, the two discover, obsess over and struggle to produce Ibsen’s play. Much of the dialogue dwells on the nature of feminism in Hedda Gabler.

But the piece is also, O’Harra points out, “absurdist, so there’re all these crazy moments. It’s hilarious.” Enriching the comedy are complications involving the translation of the play, performance rights and interference from the Prince of Wales and his paramour Lillie Langtry.

Ciaran Walsh ’15 of Washington, D.C., performs in the 2014 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College production of “The Summer in Gossensass.” The performance is part of a senior thesis project for Walsh. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The play’s meta-theatrical nature challenges the cast. If the characters are based on real people, each character at times also portrays a character from Hedda Gabler.

“It demands facile acting to even make the play intelligible to the audience,” says O’Harra. “When you read it on the page, the complexities of it are hard to understand. You have to do a good job acting for it to work.”

The production stars junior Colette Girardin of East Moriches, N.Y., as Robins and senior Hanna Allerton of New York City as Lea. The “acting inside of acting” that occurs throughout the play gives the students the opportunity to examine their own acting processes.

Also in the cast are senior Ciaran Walsh of Washington, D.C.; first-year Hope French of London; and sophomore Dan Peeples of Piermont, N.Y. For Allerton and Walsh, the production is the focus of their senior theses. Each will write a thesis detailing his or her acting process for the play and an analysis of the play itself.

Dan Peeples ’17 of Piermont, N.Y., portrays David in “The Summer in Gossensass.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The Summer in Gossensass, wrote The New York Times‘ Lawrence Van Gelder in a review of the play’s April 1998 debut, “is something of a comic valentine to the antediluvian avant-garde, a consideration of the evolution of acting styles and a trip back through time to a period when ideas about the psychological underpinnings of characters and those who play them constituted a thrilling novelty.”

Now 84, Fornes is an avant-garde Cuban-American playwright and director whom O’Harra describes as the mother of “downtown theater.” Winner of nine Obie awards, Fornes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 with her play “And What of the Night?” She helped pave the way not only for experimental and absurdist theater, but also for female and Hispanic playwrights.

As a nod to the meta-theatrics of the play, O’Harra decided to cover the Gannett Theater stage floor with photocopies of the original Ibsen script.

“The play is constantly referring to itself,” she says. “It asks questions that you didn’t know you had. It forces you to see something beyond what you expect to see.”

Brooke O’Harra, assistant professor of theater. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Good interviewers ask open-ended questions — questions that don’t have a choice of answers built in.

That’s also how Brooke O’Harra, hired this year as assistant professor of theater, approaches a play that she’s creating or directing. Unabashedly experimental, her theatrical work outside academe “is a little bit research-based and a little bit a study of process,” she says. “I never know what a play’s going to be like in the end.”

Instead, she’s in it for the exploration. “What are the questions and problems of the work going to be? How do I create systems to address those? In a way, that goes back to me being an engineering major” — which O’Harra was until quite late in her undergraduate career at Lafayette College — “and having a scientific, mathematical perspective on things.”

Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2013:

• Lydia Barnett, assistant professor of history
• Jonathan Cavallero, assistant professor of rhetoric
• Travis Gould, assistant professor of physics
  

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Co-founder of a New York City company called The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf, O’Harra’s projects have included Room for Cream, a three-season, 25-episode live lesbian soap opera that she directed, co-wrote and also adapted for performance in Istanbul; and Time Passes, a project developed with artist Sharon Hayes that consists of an eight-hour performance incorporating an audiobook of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse.

O’Harra has been a resident artist at New York’s prestigious La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company, among other organizations, and has studied and made theater in Central Europe, Asia and Africa.

Through a series of staged encounters that she is undertaking with both actors and non-actors, O’Harra these days is investigating a phenomenon she has noticed while working with acting students on contemporary plays. “Students, even when more than 50 percent of them are women, gravitate toward plays by men,” she says.

Why might that be? “As an actor, or teaching actors, you’re always looking for the moment of conflict,” O’Harra explains. “In plays by men, conflict is very mapped out” — male playwrights tend to deal in two-fisted scenes that make conflict apparent.

“In contemporary plays by women, the conflict is not apparent — it seems banal,” she says. “But it has all of this anguish and tension underneath it. And that’s a much harder thing for an actor to perform, because they want to perform that kind of, ‘I’m in love with you,’ ‘I hate you.’ ”

But the two genres are really depicting “different kinds of struggle,” she says. “I’m interested in this banality, and how do you perform the banal? How do you perform tension without performing tension? And I think it’s gendered and there’s something feminist about it.”

The first play O’Harra expects to direct at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ doesn’t quite fit that research topic, but it does exemplify her interest in the theater of the oblique. Enjoy is the English title of a work by Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada that transposes the “mumblecore” film genre to the stage and teases out the dramatic power of the inarticulate.

The New York Times‘ Jason Zinoman discussed the play’s listless and tongue-tangled characters in a 2010 review. “While these overeducated and underemployed members of the nation’s lost generation keep saying, ‘you know,’ none of them do,” he wrote. “This bittersweet drama . . . turns inarticulateness into the sort of poetry that rewards close listening.”

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, a college that prepares students for global citizenship, training as an actor is highly valuable, O’Harra says. Students of acting “have to start to understand how they exist in the world, how they function in relation to others.”

Acting teaches you, she explains, “to rework yourself, to encounter each situation in a way that you’re reading the other. That makes you a good anything — a good manager, a good public speaker, a good politician.”

After earning an English degree at Lafayette, O’Harra received a master’s of fine arts in theater at Tulane University. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, including its Experimental Theatre Wing.