CHOOSING TO PRESENT a play as good as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler--as the Quincy House Drama Society must have realized--considerably lightens the director's workload. Still, it doesn't make it disappear. The lackluster production in the Quincy House JCR this weekend shows the effects of this gap in reasoning. Uninspired line-reading and pacing, added to a lack of attention to both the grand shape of the plot and the details of the illusion, can't entirely quench the snap and sparkle of Ibsen's dialogue or the power of the story he tells, but they can go a long way in that direction. What remains is an evening of striking scenes that don't build on each other, some dramatic wallops that never quite land, and a few that hit distractingly wide of the mark. Even Ibsen's dramatic genius can't fly all by itself.

At first, director Roger Kaplan seems to be aiming for minimalism, a severe understatement that admirably suits the grim plot. The characters wear black and wander around their comfortable living room (Quincy's unadorned common room) with the same aimless ferocity that characterizes their power games. Hedda (Julie Cohen), newly married to the buffoonish George Tesman (Curt Raffi), is bitter and trapped, seeking to find artistic fulfillment by manipulating the men around her. In the few days that follow her return with Tesman from their honeymoon, Hedda gradually becomes twisted in her own plots, trapped by the circumstances that once made her powerful. The sickening build from complication to outright tragedy is quintessential Ibsen.

But it's hard to concentrate when few of the characters seem plugged into what's going on, either on the superficial level of scenery and props or the more essential one of tension and buildup. Cohen as Hedda has a good sense of time and tone, and her sudden still pauses are effective at first, but through too much of the play she seems merely to be walking from pose to pose; the intensity that could lead Hedda to destroy men's careers in her quest for "perfect moments" appears only in intermittent flashes. Raffi as Tesman and Linda Gray as Mrs. Elvsted--perhaps the feistiest of Hedda's intended victims--offer even less depth. Raffi in particular, though he seems to have a good grip on the well-meaning naive Tesman, over-emotes so consistently that his voice deteriorates into bleating.

The two actors who give the production any shape, in fact, are the ones who move beyond their lines to create characters in 3-D. Sven Krogius brings a bizarre array of mannerisms to the pivotal Judge Brack, the only personality stronger than Hedda's, and the only one who can wrest the plot out of her control. Tall and gaunt, Krogius speaks in a sneering whine and lopes through the generally imaginative blocking with enthusiasm. His malevolence becomes the production's dominant force, which unbalances things but at least raises the excitement level.

And the play comes closer to achieving dramatic balance with the arrival of Eric Jacobson as the equally pivotal character Eilert Lovborg--the pawn to contrast with Brack and Hedda's manipulations, the hidden genius whose character weaknesses lock him into the same dead-ended bitterness as the rest.

Jacobson as Lovborg is not only convincing but heartrending, with a meek bearing masking an inner, doomed nobility of character. What keeps him and Brack from salvaging the play is the same lack of ambition that hampers the other actors. This time, though, the lack comes in the production staff itself. High-schoolish, thrown-together props repeatedly puncture the illusion, starting with the opening complaint of a maiden aunt (Barbara Nathan). "There's no more space here for these flowers," she laments, looking around at the polished, unoccupied tabletops of the Quincy JCR. "So many people have sent flowers already." In later scenes Hedda's envious comments about Mrs. Elvsted's long hair ring oddly when directed at Gray, whose hair is short; the hapless Gray is forced to cry. "Let me go, let me go" at a Hedda who is supposedly grasping her by the hair and threatening to "burn it off," while Cohen barely touches her. Most incomprehensibly, Lovborg's all-important manuscript--surely not a tough prop to come by in a Harvard house--makes its appearance as a folded copy of the Boston Herald. (If intentional, the satire is sadly misdirected.)

In the end, Hedda Gabler seems to founder not through lack of talent but through lack of vigor--in conceptualizing, in listening to the lines as they're spoken, in following the illusion through. An ounce of committed effort could still send an electric current through this play, turning it into a hair-raising experience. Without it Kaplan, like Hedda, is precious unlikely to create any perfect moments.