By Danielle Mages Amato

What was the spark that made you turn to Hedda Gabler at this moment?
Katie Holmes. I had a wonderful experience directing her in The Wanderers at Roundabout, and after it was over, we sat down and said, “We should really do something together again.” So, I made a short list of plays, and sent it to her, and she said, “Wow, Hedda would be amazing, I’d love to do that.” So that was the immediate spark. It’s been a play that’s been on my to-do list for a long, long time. Ibsen, generally, has been on my list. So, it was lurking there in the recesses of my mind, but it was Katie’s desire to take on this massive thing that really brought it to life.

Barry Edelstein, Katie Holmes, and cast of The Wanderers at Roundabout's Opening Night, 2023. Photo by Tricia Baron.

What do you love about Ibsen, and about this play in particular?
There’s just something about the emotional temperature of the people, and the psychic intensity of the world that Ibsen conjures that I feel simpatico with. Two things in particular. One, the central idea of Ibsen is that our pasts are inescapable and the choices that we make in our lives stay with us and have this habit of lying dormant for years, and then suddenly erupting and changing everything. Second is that Ibsen, like Shakespeare, goes through this weird progression where the later into his career you get, the less naturalistic the writing becomes. Those late Ibsen plays – of which Hedda is one – leave naturalism behind in the same way that the four late Shakespeare plays do. There’s some symbolism there, there’s some expressionism there, but mostly, there’s a sense of wonder at the inexplicable nature of human actions. And so, the question of Hedda is, “Why is she acting like this? What is this?” Erin Cressida Wilson’s new version asks, “What kind of person does something like that?” and captures Ibsen’s late period precisely.

What did Erin’s new translation unlock for you?
For my entire career in the theatre, whenever I’ve directed a classic play not written in English, I’ve done a new translation. I think that’s important. I think the way that the theatre stays alive is that contemporary writers need to bring these old plays to life. The existing translations just all feel stuck in whatever time it was when they were made. Ibsen, in particular, suffers from this. Mostly, we know him through Victorian English translations that just layer these accretions of barnacles onto his plays. If you talk to somebody who reads Norwegian, they will be appalled at what the Victorians did, because the language of Ibsen is much blunter. You see this with the sexual content in the play, which is far more veiled in English translations of the late 19th and earlier 20th century than it is in the Norwegian itself. You read these early Ibsen translations, and everything is weirdly hidden behind this sort of gauzy, non-direct stuff. That’s not at all what he was doing. So, if you’re going to honor what Ibsen really is, you have to find an equivalently direct sort of blunt speech.

That’s the interesting thing about what Erin has done; I mean 95, percent of the lines of Ibsen are in there. This is absolutely Ibsen’s play, but it’s been—thought by thought and statement by statement—filtered through the sensibility of this very provocative writer who made a reputation for writing sexually frank and crisply expressed material when she first hit the scene in the 1990s and 2000s. Erin has just blown the dust off it. The sentences are short; the locution is not flowery in the way that Victorian Ibsen is.

How does that tone of this translation impact the production?
A fully decorated drawing room just didn’t seem to make any sense. I would read Erin’s script and think, well, you can’t have a 19th century box set with ornately upholstered Victorian fabrics and layered clothing and all that. It’s not going to make sense. There needs to be something visually spare and stripped away that is the analogy of what Erin has done with the language of Ibsen’s play. So, we just decided to pull everything out and put in only the things that you need, which are a sofa to sit on, a piano to be played, and a stove in which...well, no spoilers! There’s very little there. It’s going to be different from the ways in which our Globe audience has experienced revivals of classics, which tend to be really upholstered. This is not that. This is something very, very spare.

Barry Edelstein in rehearsal during Henry 6, 2024. Photo by Rich Soublet II.

Hedda has been a polarizing character in the history of the play. What do you find compelling about living with Hedda for an entire rehearsal and production process?
She can be incredibly difficult to be around! People call her the female Hamlet, and it’s true. She’s unbelievably mysterious. She’s many, many things. She’s a victim. She’s a tyrant. She’s violent. She’s soft. She’s inexplicably brutal to other people, and yet deeply, deeply sympathetic. She’s just an unbelievably complicated human being in the most wonderful sort of way. And Ibsen resists explaining how she got that way.

The play’s been read mostly as a critique of the patriarchy and a kind of proto-feminist exploration, and that’s absolutely what it is. For women in 19th century Norway, the options were extremely limited, and so women got trapped in terrible situations that made them lash out, and made them sometimes violent, or made them passive. That’s absolutely one reading of it, but there’s a bigger lens to it about the way in which society completely fails to make room for idiosyncratic humanity. It’s a story about a world crushing someone who is original and who lives outside the constructs that society wants to create. The thing about Hedda is she has an imagination and a mind and a worldview that is exponentially larger than anybody’s in this little university town where she lives.

What do you hope audiences are still arguing about or unsettled by as they leave the theatre?
The play invites us to ask ourselves how we express our fullest, most complicated selves in a world that wants to reduce us and wants to make us fit in certain boxes. I hope audiences think about freedom, self-expression, and how we can all live our fullest lives.