Went to see Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler a few weeks ago. Awful. I don’t want to completely blame the cast and director here. I think the source material is extremely dated and doesn’t age well — it struck me as the sort of sentiments a 17-year-old Goth Girl would consider so very, very deep.
At any rate, reviewing the play for The New York Times Ben Brantley writes:
How wise of Christopher Shinn, who did this new adaptation of Ibsen’s oft-produced ode to the frustrations of modern womanhood, to substitute “feeling dead” for the more traditional “boring myself to death.”
In one of those reviews that puts into words many of the things that frustrated you about a piece but you were unable to vocalize without sounding like a good, Brantley goes on to STEAL MY BRAIN:
The forever fresh-faced [Mary Louise] Parker, one of our most delightful actresses, has traded in her usual air of easy, quirky spontaneity for the robotic petulance of an I-hate-everybody adolescent in a yearlong sulk. With her hair darkened, her face ghostly pale and her frame skeletal thin, her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who’s given up cheerleading to be a goth because it’s way cooler and it matches the place her mind’s at now.
KEN WHEATON 