Hilda

I’m Isa Goldberg reporting on HILDA, the Off Broadway play at 59 East 59th St. Theater.

From the moment Mrs. Lemarchand enters in Carey Perloff’s production, HILDA, she begins a persistent, non-stop, automatic monologue, as if she’s not even thinking about what she’s saying. But it’s very very clear to us. She’s bartering with Hilda’s husband, Frank, for his wife’s services as a maid.

This possession of Hilda in all its manifestations (whatever Machiavellian technique it takes) is the play’s singular subject, resolving itself in Mrs. Lemarchand’s diabolical transformation into the maid as if she had sucked up her soul. As in Genet’s play of that title “The Maids”, it’s a relationship that turns into a transaction of souls in which the upper class Mrs. Lemarchand devours Hilda, consuming her in every way.

Unlike Genet’s play, however, Hilda has no presence. She never once appears on stage, but according to her employer, they have become equals. “That’s why I want Hilda to be beautiful” Mrs. Lemarchand explains, “so she can reflect me and submit to me in everything.”

Originally produced in Paris, HILDA is the work of the French-Senegalese writer, Marie Ndiaye. It’s the first play by a black woman author to be admitted to the Comedie Francaise and only the second piece accepted by a woman since it was founded.

As performed in Paris, the play expressed a nightmarish tension, a NO EXIT sense of reality in which we actually believe that the characters are stuck in these roles whether they really want to be or not. But in 2002 when it opened, it was not as obvious a political and social indictment of the class struggle in suburban Paris as it now suggests. Paris is burning and HILDA, without ever pointing a finger at race or religion, tells us why.

To drive the point home, Mrs. Lemarchand considers her relationship with her servant “democracy in action” declaring herself “very cultivated and sensitive to human suffering.” Dressed in her Chanel coat she believes it. Unfortunately, as portrayed here by Ellen Karas, the character is too much “in our face”, delivering her rat-a-tat monologue in one desperately shrill voice from beginning to end. Unlike its Parisian predecessor which was truly haunting, this production lacks subtlety, becoming a strange diatribe rather than a compelling message.

That’s This Week Off Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.