Hilda. Nora. Hedda.

The women that sprang from the head of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen have entranced, bewildered, confounded and angered scholars along with audiences for more than 100 years.

Ibsen, who was born in 1828 and died 78 years later, was a man far ahead of his times. He was a feminist and, as the 19th century crept toward the 20th, he created female characters unlike any others in what came to be called “modern drama.”

Hilda, the young heroine of “The Master Builder,” is a free spirit who rejects duty to pursue her own happiness. Nora, the main character in “A Doll House,” walks out on her husband and children for a life free of their expectations.

None of the women who populate Ibsen’s more than 20 plays are as maligned and misunderstood as Hedda Gabler, the woman for whom the playwright named his 1890 work. Ibsen expert Hermann J. Weigand in 1925 called it the “coldest, most impersonal of Ibsen’s plays.”

Sandra Hardy, a member of the theater department faculty at the University of Maine and an Ibsen scholar herself, wholeheartedly disagrees. She set out to liberate Hedda Gabler from the interpretations imposed, mostly by male academics, on her and her creator. To do that, Hardy, who reads and speaks Norwegian, did her own translation of the play and is directing a student cast in a production that opens tonight in Hauck Auditorium.

“I wanted to find more of the humor in the script,” she said last week. “Norwegians are funny and their humor is very much like Maine humor in that it’s very tongue-in-cheek and, sometimes, it’s hard to translate.”

Hardy also wanted a 21st century audience to see in Hedda what few in the 19th century could – a modern female who was incapable of conforming to society’s expectations of womanhood and chose to end her own life rather than go on unfulfilled.

“She’s a realist,” she said of the character. “Yet she also has great passion – she just has no place to put it.”

Hardy, 70, also wanted to challenge her students in ways they hadn’t been tested as actors before.

Besides her reinterpretation of the main character, Hardy’s greatest divergence from previous translations is in her portrait of Judge Brack. The friend and neighbor to Hedda and her husband, George Tesman, still wields his wealth and power over the couple, but in Hardy’s version he’s more interested in Tesman than in his wife.

Similar to male characters in many of Ibsen’s other works, Hardy said, Brack is gay. That was a particular challenge for the Old Town native who portrays him.

“To get into the mind of a homosexual man from that time period has been demanding,” Simon Ferland, 20, said. “Then, it was thought of as a weakness. That drives a lot of what the character does.”

Previous interpretations of the play have explained the character’s desire to be close to Hedda as lust or love. Other Ibsen scholars have seen his actions as blackmailing Hedda into an affair and one of the things that pushes her to take her own life. Ferland and Hardy see it differently.

“Brack wants to be close to her,” he said of his character’s relationship to the play’s namesake, “but it’s more intellectual than sexual. He trusts her. He can be himself and be vulnerable with her. He is jealous of the time she spends with other men, but that’s because he’s a possessive man.”

Anthony Arnista, 20, of Burke, Va., has had to adjust his acting style for “Hedda Gabler.” The son of a University of Maine graduate, he plays George Tesman.

“I’ve never been in a drama before,” he said. “Sandra really understands where Ibsen was going with these characters. She made Tesman more intelligent, more aware of what’s going on around him and not as goofy as he has been in earlier versions.”

Despite what it may look like from the audience’s perspective, Arnista insisted that Hedda loves her husband, just not as much as he loves her, an experience college students like him might be able to relate to.

“Hedda is extremely complex, and unraveling her enigmatic personality has been a challenge,” Sarah Farnham, 21, of Levant said of her role in a phone interview earlier this week. “She’s complicated. She’s as complicated as Hamlet.

“In early translations of the play,” Farnham said, “Hedda was seen as a dark and evil maniac. She really was thought to be insane.”

What the critics of the time did not understand, she explained, is that Hedda was trapped by the expectations of those around her and of society. She was a woman with a title, but no money of her own who knew herself well enough to know she was not suited for marriage or motherhood. She saw no other way out of her situation, according to Farnham.

While young women today have many more choices, the actress said, Hardy’s translation is relevant to the lives of college students in the 21st century.

“I sympathize with Hedda’s circumstances,” she said. “In everybody’s lives, there are obstacles that hold them back – fear, lack of resources, family circumstances. Most people can overcome the barriers placed in front of them. She felt that she had nowhere else to turn.”

“Hedda Gabler”

Who: University of Maine School of Performing Arts

Where: Hauck Auditorium

When: Through Nov. 11

Tickets: $10

Information: 581-1755

or www.umaine.edu/spa