Directed by 
J. E. R. Friedenberg 

Scenic Design by  
James V. Hilburn, Jr.* 

Costume & Hair Design by 
Lisa M. Weller 

Lighting Design by  
Jonathan Christman 

Vocal & Acting Coaching by 
Brook Davis 

Stage Manager  
Bill Diggle*

CAST 
(in order of appearance) 

MISS JULIE TESMAN  
Catherine Justice* 

BERTA   
Bethany Dulis 

GEORGE TESMAN 
Carter MacIntyre 

HEDDA GABLER  
Megan Cramer* 

MRS. ELVSTED   
Erin Wade 

JUDGE BRACK   
Brad Stephenson* 

EILERT LOVBORG   
Rohom Khonsari 

* Member of The Anthony Aston Players 

Costume Shop Supervisor  Lisa Weller  

Audience Services Coordinator  Shanda Smith  

Production Dramaturg J. K. Curry 

Assistant Stage Managers  
Noelle Balliet, Jacob Montgomery 

Master Carpenter  Eddie Childress* 

Scene Shop Assistants  
Matthew Barbour, Aaron Bokros, Eddie Childress*, Matt Fuller, Heather McClain*, Katie Rief 

Scenery & Props Crew Gerald Barbee, Robert Barnes 
Susie Beers, John Charecky, Meredith Dowdy, 
Lori Englebert, Michael P. Fallon, Sarah Grace, 
Daniel Kling, Austin Mann, Katie McCann,  
Christopher Ober, Brian Pierson, Ben Piper, Ben Stafford 
Brad Thomas, Peter Walsh, Brooke White 

Cutter/Draper  Marci Heiser 

Costume Shop Assistants  Kirstin Johnson 
Erin Korey, Kate Lewis, Melissa Osborne, Pamela Yeager 

Costume Construction Crew  Allyson Everhart 
Elizabeth Chamberlain, Autumn Cherrington 
Sarah Hagenian, Kate Hogan, Ryan Marvin 
Brent Matson, Syreeta Norwood, Valerie Patrick 
Adam Santillo, Melissa Sawyers, Courtney Sellars 
Heidi Tobaben, Erin Valenti 
Kristine VanDoren, Katrina Watson 

Wardrobe  Sarah Wakild 

Hair Stylist Nicole Baldwin 

Master Electrician Darren Linvill* 

Electrics Crew Matthew Ammann, Aaron Bokros 
Tim Dugan, Neal Dunlap, Robert Eshleman 
Matt Fuller, Blake Harper, Josh Heinzerling 
Taylor Ince, Nick John*, Christopher Vaughan 

Lightboard Operator  Peden Fitzhugh* 

Sound Design & Engineer  Matt Fuller 

Sound Board Operator  Aaron Bokros 

Publicity Meghan Higgins* 

Poster Design Jimmy Hilburn* 

Photography Bill Ray III 

Homepage Photography by Jonathan Christman 

Box Office Staff  
Ali Ayala, Sarah Brewer 
Jonathan Crosson, Jenny Ellison, Leah Hohman 

House Managers Elizabeth R.Cheek, Nick Spruill 

Front of House  Kevin Bray, Rachel Burns 
Alicia Fennel, Miriam ImOberstag 
Mark Jackson, Joseph Ladapo, Dave Whalen 

Theatre Office Assistants  Ashleigh Ellsworth,  
Sarah Kutner, Jen Phillips, Sarah Storminger,  
Amber Wiley* 
 
* Member of The Anthony Aston Players 

from Richard Gilman’s, “The Making of Modern Drama” 
Ibsen is certainly a “realist” but dramatic realism is not synonymous with emphasis on social problems and Ibsen is not the limited playwright of “ideas” whose dramas, are ones in which “people are digits, adding up to the correct ideological sum.” Our habit of looking at Ibsen not as an artist but as a sort of grim (or splendid) fulminator, an ideologue, or, at the lowest, a designer of problematic living rooms, a theatrical upholsterer, has prevented us from seeing how in his plays specific ideas or issues conceal truer, more permanent subjects. 
Ibsen’s realism is in the first place a matter of having chosen paradigmatic situations from the life of contemporary society, and to this fact we owe a large element of the renewed life of the theatre, for the sources of almost all other dramatic writing of the time were the artificialities and brittle inventions of the theater itself. Ibsen made his social plays out of nothing other than what might have occurred in what we call real life. It was a form of anti-romanticism, an outward sobriety of imagination, but it was also a specifically aesthetic repudiation of the stage as an arena for fantasy. This realism incorporated into its enterprise what might be, and were, regarded as “issues.” But it long ago became clear that we have to distinguish Ibsen’s thought from the narrow and localized ideas,for which he was at first wrongly praised and then wrongly blamed the former because he was being so intellectually “advanced” and modern, the latter because he was scanting feeling and sensuousness in his work. As Eric Bentley has written, Ibsen “is far less interested in ‘modern ideas’ than in certain ideas that go behind them. In Ibsen one must always look for the idea behind the idea.” 
One must also look for the poetry behind the prose. In giving up formal verse Ibsen remained a poet in the sense in which he had earlier defined it: as the man who sees. To achieve a drama of contemporary life, Ibsen rooted his methods in a lyricism that was informal, hidden, a matter of textures and relationships, implications and elisions, a prose-poetry which at first glance seemed only to be prose. Driven down into the depths, beyond the audience’s immediate ear, it lay out of the grasp of paraphrase and socially exploitable meanings. 
It was Henry James who saw most clearly the nature of his genius, grasping with great perspicacity the true imaginative action of the social plays. On the surface Ibsen was “massively common and middle-class,” but James could see past that to his “independence, his intensity, his vividness, the hard compulsions of his strangely inscrutable art.” Ibsen’s subject, James went on to say, “is always, like the subjects of all first-rate men, primarily an idea,” and his chief idea is the “individual caught in the fact.” The barest of propositions, the most abstract of critical formulations but in its light everything puzzling and deceptive in Ibsen yields something to our understanding. We can now see what kind of dramas are being staged: enactments of the self versus the structure of experience, of personal being opposed by the hard details, outside and beyond the values we may place on them, of things as they are. Ibsen had spoken of his plays as dealing with contradictions, most widely that between “life and theory in general.” One of his greatest artistic achievements was to have imagined the individual as a kind of theorem, something asserted but not proven; life, facticity, would provide the test and the testing was the drama.