In the playbill for The Old Globe‘s production of Hedda Gabler, director Barry Edelstein writes of the play’s enduring power: “When there’s a theatre on Mars, Hedda Gabler will be in the repertoire.”
San Diego audiences have seemed to agree.
Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play about an extraordinary woman living in decidedly ordinary surroundings, starring Katie Holmes in the title role, takes its final curtain call Sunday after being extended due to popular demand.
For all his admiration of Ibsen, whom he places “at the scale of Shakespeare,” Edelstein, The Old Globe’s artistic director, had never directed one of his works until now.
“It’s one of the great plays in world drama and one of the masterpieces of Henrik Ibsen,” Edelstein said. “I’ve always loved Ibsen and I’ve produced a little Ibsen, been around Ibsen plays, but never done one. And I thought, well, this is exactly the kind of thing The Globe should do.”
View this post on InstagramThe second piece of the puzzle was Holmes herself. Edelstein had worked with her in New York in 2023, and after that production closed, the two began talking about what they might do together next. Hedda Gabler rose to the top of their list.
Rather than rely on Victorian-era translations, which Edelstein felt carried a dusty, dated sensibility, he turned to playwright Erin Cressida Wilson, a longtime collaborator from their shared time in New York City’s downtown theater scene. Wilson, who later wrote the film “Secretary” before stepping away from the theater, agreed to write a new adaptation.
“The version of it that she wrote is extremely spare,” Edelstein said. “It’s all Ibsen, it’s the thoughts of Ibsen’s characters. The lines are the lines that Ibsen wrote, the ideas that Ibsen expresses, but they are expressed in a sort of truncated, blunt, sexually charged spare American English written by Erin that manages to be both contemporary and period at the same time.”
That spare language drove the visual design. Edelstein envisioned stripping away the Victorian clutter often associated with the play in favor of something more elemental. The central image that came to him: a giant sofa on a turntable.
“A sofa is the most bourgeois object possible and it’s a perfect symbol of Hedda’s oppressive bourgeois existence,” he said.
Set designer Mark Wendland took that concept and shaped it into the production audiences see today – a black void with a custom-fabricated, oversized sofa on a dual-turntable mechanism engineered entirely in-house by Old Globe technical director Joe Powell and the theater’s prop artisans.
Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Aunt Julie Tesman and Charlie Barnett as George Tesman on the couch. (Photo by Rich Soublet II)It’s an ambitious production, but Edelstein noted that The Old Globe’s nonprofit model, with 40 percent of its $40 million budget funded by philanthropy, keeps ticket prices accessible in a way Broadway cannot match.
The production’s live piano score, composed by Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time Grammy Award winner Caroline Shaw, adds another layer of emotional depth. The piano has special meaning in the play – it is the one object Hedda brings with her into her new home, the one thing that is truly hers.
“That has lifted the whole thing to a level I could not have anticipated,” Edelstein said of Shaw’s score. “Caroline’s work just brings an emotional intensity to it, a sense of poignancy to it, a sense of propulsion to it.”
Holmes brings something unexpected to the role, Edelstein said. Rather than the scenery-chewing, volatile Hedda familiar from some stagings, Holmes plays her as endearing, even funny – which makes her eventual destructiveness all the more unsettling.
“Katie is extremely likable and you find her very winning. Then she starts destroying and it’s so upsetting,” Edelstein said.
The director noted that Holmes has grown into a formidable stage actress since her breakthrough television role on “Dawson’s Creek,” which she began at 19.
“This is the kind of part that only major actresses attempt and she’s the real thing,” he said. “She’s also nice as can be. She’s the most wonderful, generous, kind, lovely human being. She’s just a delight.”
Alexander Hurt as Ejlert Lövborg and Katie Holmes as Hedda Gabler at The Old Globe. (Photo by Rich Soublet II)The play’s themes, such as women constrained by men, have resonated powerfully with contemporary audiences, Edelstein said.
“Sadly, we’re living in a moment in American society where the patriarchy is having a really good run,” he said, “what we thought we had evolved past, we haven’t really at all.”
He described the nightly audience reaction to one of the most iconic moments in theater history, a scene so famous it ranks alongside Hamlet holding a skull, as a reliable jolt for first-time viewers unfamiliar with the play.
“Every time I watch it, people gasp,” he said. “The joy of having audiences discover this thing as a brand-new play is why I do this. This is why I’m in this field.”
Now in its final week, the production has only grown richer, Edelstein said. He attends weekly, sending notes to the cast through the stage manager, but the deepening is largely organic.
“As they repeat it dozens of times, it just gets deeper. It gets more natural, it gets more lived in, it gets more human and more real,” he said.
With the curtain coming down for good Sunday, Edelstein said he is sorry to see it end.
Next up, Edelstein will direct Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in The Globe’s outdoor theater this summer.
Hedda Gabler plays through March 22 at The Old Globe in San Diego’s Balboa Park. For ticket information, go to: www.theoldglobe.org.
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