Hedda Gabler

By far the most successful parts of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new Hedda Gabler are the first nightmarish minutes. A half-dressed Hedda (Parker) stumbles out of bed and staggers around her new house, yanking covers off furniture and moving chairs and settees like a zombie interior decorator. Creepy industrial-piano music by PJ Harvey plays; Hildegard Bechtler’s massive drawing room looms. It’s when Parker has to speak lines and interact with other characters that trouble arises. We expect Ibsen’s antihero to have difficulty connecting with people, but at least she’s in the same play as them.

Parker is a fiercely magnetic performer, her porcelain beauty and blank, deadpan hostility enticing and repellent at the same time. She ought to be perfect as the highborn Hedda, stuck in a middle-class marriage to academic boor Tesman (Cerveris) but longing for the reckless hedonism of dissolute philosopher Lovborg (Sparks). A late-Romantic sadist, Hedda wants to doom another person’s fate, but after she does, she finds that her own life has fallen into the lecherous hands of Judge Brack (Peter Stormare).

Ian Rickson recently staged a fine Seagull on Broadway, but this production seems weirdly stilted and slack at the joints. Christopher Shinn’s adaptation pares away verbiage in favor of keener subtext, leading to arrhythmic dialogue and slack pacing. Sparks offers respite with fire and intensity, but Parker’s somnambulant Hedda seems like a weak idea given free rein. If the drama itself is actually Hedda’s nightmare, we’re having it too.—David Cote

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