Hedda Gabler
Watching the current production of Hedda Gabbler from the Roundabout, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was watching the same play as the newspaper critics. The notoriously difficult title role is masterfully embodied by Mary Louise Parker as the quintessential bad girl, a fin-de-siècle Heather who isn’t very good at screwing things up, although she certainly tries.
Boy, does she! As Wikipedia notes, "Hedda may be portrayed as an idealistic heroine fighting society, a victim of circumstance, a prototypical feminist, or a manipulative villain." Director Ian Rickson chose a more complicated path. This Hedda is both victim and villain, a product of her time but timeless in her malice.
Parker’s performance is all controlled rage. I can’t think of another actress with better control of her craft. We sense, subtly building through her Iago-like machinations, a woman on the verge of one hell of a nervous breakdown. It’s like an "Othello" in which Iago and Desdemona are embodied in one person.
It helps that her husband is played by Michael Cerveris, another great actor who conveys Jørgen as a total wimp, a second-rate academic climbing up the greasy pole--but who grows into a realization that his spouse isn’t quite the innocent trophy wife he thought he had married.
No, this isn’t a perfect production. Despite an impressive resume of English-language performances in several media, the Swedish Peter Stormare betrays a certain discomfort wrapping his voice around the words. His Judge Brack, whose cynical pursuit of the beautiful Hedda recalls a legal Addison DeWitt, comes across as a more "street" than "suite."
As the innocent lover of Hedda’s old flame Ejlert, Ana Reeder’s line readings vary from chirpy to whiny. A pleasantly filled-out woman, Reeder does, however, look more or the period than the paper-thin Parker. (This was an age when thin was not in.) But she rises to the occasion when she is betrayed. Her tears are real, and moving.
As the decadent intellectual whom both women are hot for. Paul Sparks conveys a dark, brooding sensuality that is period-perfect. This guy is "mad, bad and dangerous to know," to quote a lover of another hyper-talented bad boy, Lord Byron.
The set designer Hildegard Bechtler does the play no favors. Her sitting room is too vast and empty. The players are continually moving furniture around--hardly the task of the middle-class in Victorian Scandinavia. A split set that would have shown us the second room (although not altogether, since that’s where the famous ending takes place off stage) would have been more effective.
But Rickson’s and the adapter of the original Norwegian, Chrisopher Shinn’s, interpretion of the play as a black comedy seems just right. OK, so there’s more "black" than "comedy." Still, you can’t help but be fascinated by the way Hedda tries to screw up the lives of everybody around her. Even as she appalls us with her antics, she also amuses us, in spite of ourselves.
When she puts down the maid for leaving her hat on a chair, we know full well that she knows it belongs to Jorgen’s beloved aunt. Her malice toward this poor woman becomes a leitmotif for Hedda’s inner bitch, and, yes, it’s funny. Maybe some critics don’t like that, but it’s there, in Ibsen.
At the end of the performance I attended, the audience gave a rousing cheer to the actors, especially Parker. They understood what some of our high-toned critics missed: that whether the action takes place in Norway 100 years ago or on the Upper East Side of "Gossip Girls," people are the same, for better or--in this case--worse.
’Hedda Gabbler’
American Airlines Theater
227 W/ 42nd St.
212-719-1300
Through March 29
