Hedda Gabler: Drama's Favorite Hot Mess Heads Back to Broadway

Brace yourselves, theatergoers: Hedda Gabler, featuring one of the juiciest and bitchiest femme fatales ever penned, is back on Broadway, with Tony Award winner Mary-Louise Parker slipping into the titular role. For this revival, the Roundabout Theatre Company has tapped Ian Rickson, acclaimed last fall for his work on another classic, The Seagull, to direct an updated adaptation by Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Shinn.

Had Hedda, the original desperate housewife, made her debut a la reality TV, she’d be a tabloid star by now. (You can almost see the supermarket headline, screaming next to issues of Reader's Digest: “Hedda Shaves Head, Fires Pistols at Paparazzi!”) Self-absorbed, commitment-phobic and possibly manic depressive, the character is strikingly contemporary despite 110 years on the page, while the show, about a volatile newlywed slamming against the bars of her own gilded cage, has continued to fascinate audiences (and some of the world’s biggest female stars) for generations, scoring a staggering 19 productions on Broadway alone since its debut in 1898.

So, what is it about Hedda? The catalyst for her legend is shattering Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen—and the tireless work of adapters like Shinn, who have worked to keep that legend alive.

The Man Behind the Woman
Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, with all the trimmings of the archetypal, insufferable artistic icon. Moody from the start, he was described by his own sister as “an unsociable child, never a pleasant companion and out of sympathy with all the rest of the family.” The son of a wealthy merchant father and artistic mother, Ibsen spent his first seven years living in affluence in the village of Skien, a place he loved despite a distaste for everyone around him. “The inhabitants of Skien were quite unworthy to possess my birthplace,” he wrote bluntly many years later. In keeping with the brooder’s theme, Ibsen was an excellent student but socially detached, taking solace in the arts and at one point declaring he would be a professional painter.

By age eight, however, the artsy, budding-hipster party was over. The Ibsen family lost everything due to its father’s debts and was forced to relocate to a broken-down farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Ibsen’s education ended at age 15, when he was forced to do what many moody, creative types reluctantly do: get a job, specifically as a druggist’s apprentice at a pharmacy in Grimstad.

Grimstad was no easier on Ibsen, who worked full-time while moonlighting as a poet. The standoffish young man had particular trouble with women “because he was so spectral,” a resident recalled. Not surprisingly, failed relationships, painful sexual histories and emotional numbness are central themes in his work. More on that later…. By his early twenties, Ibsen had had enough of the real world and took off for Christiania, where he tried to enroll in the city’s university as a physician; he failed the entrance exam. Backup plan? The arts.

Oh, the Drama(tist)
Ibsen threw himself head-on into the world of the stage. In 1851 he was given the position of “theater poet” for the newly built National Theater in Bergen, holding the title for six years before becoming director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania in 1857. There Ibsen helped stage more than 150 plays, learning the intricate ins and outs of the industry and the craft that encompassed it.

In 1862 he officially crossed to playwriting when his cynical, satirical Love’s Comedy hit the stage to both critical and public acclaim. Though the first produced, the play was not Ibsen’s first written. That honor belonged to the historical tragedy Catilina, which sold only 30 copies, received no press whatsoever, and wasn’t produced until long after fame found its writer.

Following Love’s Comedy, Ibsen wrote Ghosts, the dramatic poem Peer Gynt, the famed A Doll’s House, When We Dead Awaken and, of course, Hedda Gabler, all of which fell under the heading of psychological or social dramas. Combined, these works helped define Ibsen as a “moralist,” one who used theater as a forum to examine the politics of humanity rather than as a space to entertain. (His plays may not have had big production numbers, be he’d be damned if they didn’t have a point.)

As a result, Ibsen left in indelible mark on theater—audiences openly argued what his ephemeral plays "meant;" characters richly layered with neuroses and subtext were imitated by generations of playwrights to follow (paging Violet Weston of August: Osage County...); even psychologists found themselves discussing Ibsen’s plays in published studies of the human condition. By the time he died in 1906, Ibsen had become one of the biggest celebrities in 19th century Europe and the pride of Norway, and has since been immortalized as one of the greatest dramatists in history.

 
Hedda, Herself
In 1890, Ibsen settled in Munich, Germany, to relentlessly work on Hedda Gabler, the story of a woman whose personal stagnation sets off a chain of tragic events. Upon its completion, Ibsen declared, “It has not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies upon the groundwork of certain social conditions and principles of the present day.” Hedda was an immediate publishing success, going into print in six countries before it even hit the stage.

The play was rumored to have been inspired by the true story of a German woman who poisoned herself simply because she was bored with life. Revival adaptor Christopher Shinn, however, offers insight to the mind behind the manuscript.

"He was in a real state of conflict about his sexual life,” Shinn explains of Ibsen. “He was in a relatively unhappy marriage at that point and becoming increasingly obsessed with this younger woman he’d met. It was clear he was sexually drawn to her, but never, as far as we know, had any sexual contact with her. He was in terrible turmoil about, on the one hand, wanting to remain faithful, and on the other hand, wanting to explore what might happen with this woman. You see that conflict in the play: Part of Hedda is bound to convention and social norms. Another part of her is wild and wants to subvert and escape. I think that’s absolutely what was happening inside of Ibsen because of the [love] triangle.”

Breaking In
Hedda Gabler, starring Clara Heese, debuted in Munich in 1891 to mostly negative reviews, despite the popularity of the show in intellectual circles. A British production opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on April 20 of the same year starring Elizabeth Robins, who went on to play the role during its first New York engagement in 1898 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. The play didn’t really hit Broadway until 1903, however, when a production featuring Minnie Maddern Fiske became so successful it was revived the season after the initial limited engagement.

Ibsen’s classic was subsequently produced on the Rialto in 1906 (starring Alla Nazimova), 1918 (again with Nazimova), 1924 (Clare Eames), 1926 (Emily Stevens), 1928 (Eva Le Gallienne), 1929 (Blanche Yurka), 1938 (back to Nazimova), 1942 (Katina Paxinou), 1948 (and back to Le Gallienne), 1971 (Claire Bloom), 1994 (Kelly McGillis) and 2002 (a Tony-nominated Kate Burton).

But that’s only the beginning: Actresses who have put their spin on the part include Ingrid Bergman in a 1963 TV adaptation, Dame Maggie Smith at the Cambridge Theatre’s 1970 revival, Kate Mulgrew in 1989 at LA’s Mark Taper Forum, Annette Bening to rave reviews at the Geffen Playhouse in 1999, Martha Plimpton to raves at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2001, Elizabeth Marvel in an acclaimed deconstruction at New York Theatre Workshop in 2004, Eve Best in London in 2005, and, most recently, Cate Blanchett, who won Australia’s Helpmann Award for her performance before bringing it to BAM. The downtown theater company Les Freres Corbusier even cheekily reinvented the show in 2006 with an adaptation called Heddatron, which starred half a dozen robots bleeping onstage.

With each incarnation, Hedda changes: Some actresses see her as the victim; others the tragic heroine, others a villainess. Sometimes she is simply the most despicable woman to hit the stage since Medea, a creature who destroys lives, dangles affairs over the heads of “friends” for entertainment and is so self-absorbed it’s a wonder she’s able to converse with the other characters long enough to sustain a play. But she is never boring.

Hot Mess Hedda
More than a century after this toxic newlywed first took the stage, Hedda Gabler has a way of ringing true no matter what generation is watching her fall apart.

“Look at the divorce rate, the anguish people feel about their sexual relationships,” Shinn says of the play’s staying power. “Look at all the sexless relationships, or the tempestuous relationships that are sexual and then end in a traumatic way. We have not progressed in terms of intimacy since 1890. Or ever! People still struggle with love and sex, so we felt like a production that emphasized sexuality, the trauma of love, the difficulties of intimacy, would be a way to really reach people today. That to me felt like what our emphasis was.”

Further updating what could simply be another stodgy costume drama is Mary-Louise Parker, the dark-eyed stage and screen veteran with an uncanny knack for layered, spot-on portrayals of women with a lot bubbling under the surface. “What [Mary-Louise] wanted to do fit in incredibly well with what [director Ian Rickson] and I wanted to do,” Shinn says, “which was treat this like a new play while still honoring Ibsen. We want to stay true to his intentions as deeply as possible, but recognize that when he wrote the play it was radical.”

As all adaptors do, Shinn worked from a word-for-word English translation of the play, which, he says, could never be performed because it is “incredibly long, incredibly repetitive and incredibly old-fashioned.” The revival intentionally eschews the typical restating of names, endless exposition and allusions to whatever the characters are actually trying to say to focus on the newest Hedda’s major objective.

“People are going to come see this play in New York City, on Broadway, in 2009. We have to find a way to speak to them that challenges them, frightens them and confronts them with things about themselves that they don’t want to think about,” Shinn notes, “because that’s what Ibsen did. It feels like the changes we have made were, we felt, keeping with exactly what Ibsen would have wanted.”