The Hedda Syndrome

Three acclaimed actresses peer into the psyche of Ibsen's 'infinitely perverse' heroine.

By Martha Hostetter

A classic is a classic because it is modern.
--Liviu Ciulei

Mounting a classic is a process of excavation. In looking for what Strindberg called the "nut" of the drama, theatre artists sort through the detritus of past productions—the fingerprints left by the many directors, designers, actors, translators and critics who have handled it before. When this process works, we say that a production is "fresh," that the classic has been "resurrected" for our time—implying that it’s been buried, like some artifact. But a classic drama doesn’t exist in stasis, somewhere back there. Instead, it is played out over time and space as a slowly unraveling conversation. Classics are classics not because we "discover" them, but because they’re continuously discoverable.

Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 masterpiece Hedda Gabler has been fueling world theatre for 110 years. Along with A Doll’s House and Peer Gynt, it is the most performed of Ibsen’s plays. The character of Hedda herself is irreconcilable—witty and charming; idealistic and romantic; capable of great intelligence, even wisdom; but she is also banal, materialistic, snobbish and determinedly cruel. Both victim and victimizer, she is at the heart of our fascination with the play.

Ibsen wanted a drama with the emotional depths and metaphorical range of Shakespeare, but one that could exist within the musty drawing rooms and gaslit parlors of the 19th-century middle class. He includes the unseemly details—the slipcovers on the furniture; the insinuating in-laws; the petty jockeying for wealth and position. Ibsen found the bare bones of Hedda’s story in two newspaper tabloid stories—one about a young woman who killed herself in Munich and another about a young wife who burned her husband’s manuscript. Both women did these things, the papers reported, for no discernible reason. In creating Hedda, Ibsen recorded his knowledge of the human soul, and then wrote his audience’s rejection of it into the play: "People don’t do such things!" declares the fastidious Judge Brack, after Hedda shoots herself in the head. 

Ibsen was on hand to witness the miserable failure of the Hedda Gabler premiere in Munich, in 1891. Later that year, in Paris, the actor playing Hedda—who had loudly declared her complete incomprehension of her character—took refuge in one of the era’s stock characters: the femme fatale. It took an American named Elizabeth Robins, an unknown and penniless actor living in London who was cast in the first English-language production in April of 1891, to unleash Hedda’s theatrical possibilities. Robins argued that, since this "new drama" offered a different vision of the human condition, it demanded a different kind of acting. Most critics decried the play’s moral "pestilence," even while grudgingly admitting its theatrical power: "So specious is the dramatist; so subtle is his skill in misrepresentation, so fatal is his power of persuasion that, for a moment, we believe Hedda Gabler is a noble heroine and not a fiend," Clement Scott wrote in The Daily Telegraph. But the production became an extraordinary popular success, and a group of influential writers, including William Archer, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce, rallied around the Ibsen cause. 

Henry James—a writer who knew something about malignance and repressed desire—produced a landmark critical response, "On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler." The play is "the dramatization of a condition more than an action," James wrote, and Hedda herself is "infinitely perverse," but she is also "various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen interpretations." Ibsen, James predicted, was "destined to be adored by the ‘profession.’ He will remain intensely dear to the actor and the actress. He cuts them out work to which the artistic nature in them joyously responds—work difficult and interesting, full of stuff and opportunity."

James was proven correct: Hedda soon became the Lear of the classical women’s repertory, one of the great, truly daunting roles. A few actresses made their imprint early on: Alla Nazimova’s smoldering sexuality, Eleanora Duse’s world weariness, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s malice (she played the part emphatically pregnant) set archetypal patterns for the character. 

Directors have also made their mark. As early as 1906, the Russian experimental director Vsevolod Meyerhold felt the play needed to be deconstructed. In his production, he stripped all allusions to time and place in order to get at "the primitive, purified expression behind the play." In 1964 Ingmar Bergman directed what might be described as a postmodern production: his Hedda was humiliated by the identities that others imposed on her and desperately searched for the evidence of her elusive self. She paced like a caged animal, lighted and then extinguished cigarettes, rolled her eyes, sighed, bit her hand. At one point she ironically perused a book, as if in a parody of the manners of a well-educated 19th-century woman; after a few moments of feigned interest, she let the book fall to the ground. In Colin McColl’s 1990 production, brought to an international Ibsen festival by the Downstage Theatre of New Zealand, Hedda became the director, stopping scenes to play them again and requiring the other actors to try different stagings and emphases. Perhaps in repetition and revision, this Hedda hoped to understand her fate.

Clearly, the 110-year-long search for Hedda has yielded not a single portrait of a troubled personality but a gallery of variants.

Two recent, streamlined versions of the text, by director Doug Hughes and playwright Jon Robin Baitz, have ushered in several major productions around the country. Over the past few months, I have seen Judith Light play Hedda in Michael Kahn’s production at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.; Martha Plimpton in Doug Hughes’s production at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company; and Kate Burton in a production, directed by Nicholas Martin, that began in 2000 as a joint effort between Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre and Massachusetts’s Williamstown Theatre Festival, moved to Boston’s Huntington Theatre, and then arrived on Broadway in October. 

Judith Light agreed to play Hedda, she says, precisely because it is such a daunting role. Best known for her years in television, Light had not acted on stage in 22 years. Then, in 1999, she won the role (originated by Kathleen Chalfant) of Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor dying of cancer, in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning drama Wit. For Light, who had trained at Northwestern University and who had acted in repertory theatres before going to Hollywood, this was no simple homecoming: She had to shave her head, appear naked and otherwise throw herself into an immensely challenging role—a transformation that critics found utterly convincing. Her performance, Peter Marks wrote in the New York Times, was a cause for "exultation." "The idea of playing Hedda frightened me," Light says, "and that very thought told me that I needed to do it."

For Martha Plimpton, accepting the role of Hedda required a different kind of conviction. The daughter of the actors Keith Carradine and Shelley Plimpton, the 31-year-old Plimpton appeared in her first movie at age eight. She has recently forged a thriving theatre career and, in 1998, joined the legendary Steppenwolf ensemble. "I know that it’s quite common and understandable that there’s this idea that only an actress of a certain maturity would be capable of performing the complexities of the character," she tells me, "but I think that there’s a reason that Ibsen specified a younger Hedda." In having the confidence to cast her, Doug Hughes, the play’s adapter as well as its director, made it possible for Plimpton "to explore things that are, I think, universal for women of my age." A younger Hedda also demystifies the role. "We made an effort to take some of the ‘mickey’ off of her, to make her a little less of the Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse kind of character. Hughes always said—and I think this is essential to any discussion of the play—that this play has always suffered from title-character syndrome. It’s called Hedda Gabler, but it’s not about Hedda. It’s not driven by her; she’s not the catalyst for anything. It’s all the other people around her who drive the play."

Kate Burton—the daughter of Richard Burton, who had his share of classical roles—has spent most of her career doing regional and Broadway theatre. As part of her training at the Yale School of Drama, she spent a year preparing scenes from Strindberg, Chekhov and Ibsen, but she avoided the latter whenever she could. "My very first scene [at Yale] was from Ghosts," she recalls. "I remember having a really horrendous time with that. I just couldn’t find the key to those characters, and I think probably it was because I hadn’t lived on the planet long enough." Over the years, a few productions began to pique her interest—Ingmar Bergman’s stark and sensual Nora, the formidable Dianne Weist in Hedda Gabler at Yale Rep. "It took me some time—22 years, actually—to get a handle on Ibsen. When I was asked to play the part, I was intrigued. I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go.’ "

Directors frequently like to communicate some of Hedda Gabler’s essential qualities in the first moments that she appears in the play. Judith Light’s Hedda first appears in a wordless overture, her elegant figure thrown into relief against the set’s deep blue walls—a Hedda lost at sea. But hers is no icy, mysterious femme fatale. Light and Kahn had agreed early on that Hedda’s much-proclaimed boredom is not passive or languid—she is agitated, constantly moving about the room rearranging furniture, gratuitously lashing out at Tesman’s aunt or the maid. She has "the kind of energy that’s like a horse waiting to run a race," Light says. It’s a boredom borne not out of a lack of diversion but out of a deep-seated, gnawing agitation. Light’s Hedda reaches out for a vase of flowers—as if to anchor herself to the physical world—and the sweet smell brings on a rush of morning sickness. The question of whether or not Hedda is pregnant often hangs over the play, but Light’s Hedda is clearly and painfully aware of the life growing inside her.

Martha Plimpton’s Hedda strides onto the stage amid patches of darkness and light while the sound of whispering fills the air. Her tightly pulled-back hair reveals regular, nearly expressionless features and wide-set eyes—a mask that rearranges to feign interest or sympathy, but rarely cracks. Plimpton’s Hedda, by her own admission, remains opaque. "The more I read, the less possible it was to see any kind of arc [in Hedda’s character]," Plimpton tells me. "She struck me as a series of actions that were disconnected on the surface and very much living in a sort of Brechtian vacuum. She does not have a master plan—she’s smart, but she’s not a wicked weaver of spells. You know, we have in our culture this need to sort of stamp everything, put it in a box, give it a name. It’s what I refer to as the ‘Oprah-fication’ of the nation—and I think Hedda Gabler is not a play that you can do that with, really. This is not a story that has clear answers."

Nicholas Martin follows Ibsen’s script by delaying Hedda’s entrance. She is introduced to us, in reverential tones, by the maid, Tesman’s Aunt Julia and a thoroughly pleased-with-himself Tesman. When Kate Burton’s Hedda arrives, in an elegant peignoir, coffee cup in hand, she becomes the life of the party, reveling in Ibsen’s staccato dialogue and glancing wit. The production hovers, for a moment, on drawing room comedy, a feeling that Burton didn’t shy away from. "One of my favorite scenes," Burton says, "is when George and I are by ourselves, and I’m rearranging the furniture, saying, ‘Oh, you know, George, the piano doesn’t really go in this room.’ It’s like: ‘At Home with the Tesmans.’" When Burton asked the play’s adapter, Jon Robin Baitz, for advice about playing Hedda, he told her: "You’re the funniest and smartest person in the room." A window opened: Burton had done three Irish plays immediately before playing Hedda—Brian Friel’s Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Frank McGuinness’s The Factory Girls and Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane—and she understood how Irish characters can use humor as a weapon, to turn the tables on someone or to deflect attention from their own pain. With this experience under her belt, she approached Hedda by "starting on page one," she says. "Ibsen really gives you everything you need to have—you just need to show up."

In envisioning Hedda’s youth, all three actresses point out that Hedda is her father’s daughter, as the play’s title makes clear: she marries George Tesman but remains Hedda Gabler. Hedda’s mother is never mentioned, and Hedda is disgusted, Plimpton says, "at all things human—death, mortality, illness, pregnancy, family." She imagines the young Hedda as "very much a tomboy. The son her father never had—until she became a teenager, at which point this would have been a complication." Hedda’s desire to inhabit a man’s world, her violent response to Lovborg’s overtures, her fascination with pistols—all of this lays the groundwork for a complicated sexual dynamic. 

In following what she calls the play’s "road map," Burton learned to appreciate Hedda’s unpredictable, anti-rational nature. When Hedda rails against Tesman’s "penny-pinching world," she entirely exempts herself from considerations of how she came to be living with him in the first place. "It’s as though she had nothing to do with it," Burton laughs. "What a fantastic thing to say! But whenever you get to point where you think, ‘Oh, my god, Hedda, how can you do that?’, then Ibsen has written something that elicits—not necessarily sympathy—but understanding."

Perhaps the greatest challenge in playing Hedda is that she has no soliloquies: We see her tragedy unfolding from moment to moment, and yet we aren’t privy to her thoughts. "She’s looking for her life," Light says, comparing Hedda to the character she played in Wit. "Dr. Bearing shuts herself off from the world, as a Donne scholar, and keeps herself protected in that way, she thinks." But her illness strips away these trappings, at first brutalizing and dehumanizing her, and then finally leaving her with a newfound sense of grace. With this kind of transformation in mind, Light imagines that Hedda’s life could have been different—that, if she had taken a chance, she could have found the life she was looking for, even in her marriage to Tesman. Instead, Light says, "Hedda just stayed on her own path, in that kind of locked-up, defensive posture. She couldn’t let anything in." Moments before killing herself, Hedda seems to offer Tesman an opening. "She says to Tesman, ‘Is there anything at all I can do to help [in your work]?’ And when he says no, it’s too much for her to bear." 

To understand Hedda’s motivations, Plimpton imagined her escapist fantasies. "We focused a lot on the Dionysian ideal, on Hedda’s fascination with Lovborg’s life as a libertine," she says. "When one is obsessed with that kind of supernatural power, the natural line to take, it seemed to us, was paralysis. There’s a lot of that in the Greeks—that kind of unfettered freedom is incredibly destructive. The fear that it can create—where it takes you, there are no laws, and there is nowhere to go." Hedda became a prisoner of her own dreams.

I saw Hedda Gabler three times in as many months, and each time, Hedda’s suicide was jarring. Calm seems to descend on the scene just before it happens: Lovborg’s death has been reported; Thea and Tesman have decided to reconstruct and publish his book and sit together quietly, going through his notes; Judge Brack relaxes in the knowledge that he finally has gotten what he wants. But Hedda recedes, leaving and reentering the room, playing the piano wildly, running out of time. "One feels as if one were climbing a spiral—faster and higher, faster and higher—until the final pistol shot, with its sense of release," Eva Le Gallienne said of playing this scene, in 1928.

"Doug chose very specifically to commit the final act on stage, in full view, not as it is written, and not as it is often done," Plimpton says. "And he did this because I think in some ways he wanted the audience to see not only the finality, but he wanted them to be completely privy to Hedda’s only act of courage—a vacant act, but an act. Every night there was some audible gasp, or scream, or some sound from the audience at that moment when she puts the pistol to her head."

For Light, Hedda’s tragedy is a warning. "Don’t we all know a person like this? Aren’t we like this?" she asks. In her scrambling for fulfillment and her limitations, Hedda is clearly recognizable. "If we go down that path, this is where we end up. We don’t handle rage and jealousy and manipulation and don’t work to come from the heart. We end up being destructive, and in some ways, even if we’re still alive, we die inside." 

Kate Burton opened Hedda Gabler in New York City in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center. "In light of everything we’re dealing with as a country, you know it’s pretty freaky every night to say: ‘What Eilert Lovborg’s done—it’s an amazing act of liberation! To know that there can actually still be acts of courage in this world. Something that literally shimmers with beauty.’ It’s a terrorist mentality." Burton remembers that "at those first few performances—eight days after the World Trade Center attack—audiences would really react audibly to those lines." 

Some have speculated that one woman’s tragedy might have little appeal at a time when, as a country, we are in collective mourning. But, as Nietzsche proposed and Ibsen demonstrated, there is a kind of redemption to be found in the wedding of Dionysian insights about life’s mystery and darkness with an Apollonian clarity and beauty of form. In this finely wrought tragedy, which leaves us with far more questions than answers, Ibsen has created a story that provokes, evolves and endures.
 

Martha Hostetter is a 2001-2002 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.

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