By Robert Simonson
08 Jan 2009

Hedda Gabler star Mary-Louise Parker
photo by Nigel Parry

Actress Mary-Louise Parker puts a contemporary spin on Ibsen's tragic heroine, Hedda Gabler, in a new Broadway production.

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To New York theatre audiences, Mary-Louise Parker is a now kinda gal. Her signature stage roles have either placed her on equal temporal footing with us (Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss, David Auburn's Proof) or in the recent past (Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive). Using her Gotham résumé alone as a yardstick, one would assume that her next job, the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, would be a stretch. But one would be wrong.

"I spent a lot of years in a corset, actually," the Tony-winning, 44-year-old New Yorker comments dryly. In fact, one of the first roles she encountered in drama school was the ultimate Ibsen heroine, Nora in A Doll's House. From then on, she hit the regions, tackling assignments in Molière, Coward, Jacobean dramas, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. What's more, she has long known that the restless, scheming, gun-loving Hedda would be part of her future.

"People have been asking me to do this play for quite a long time," she says in the curious, kittenish cadences familiar to her followers, "and it never quite felt like the right time. I never felt inspired by it. I was leaning toward Doll's House for a while. And then [Roundabout Theatre Company artistic director] Todd Haimes suggested Ian Rickson. Things just sort of snowballed after that."

Ian Rickson is the British director who scored a distinct critical hit this fall with his rendition of Ibsen contemporary Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. "Mary-Louise has an amazing vitality onstage," says Rickson of his Hedda. "She manages to be both unsentimental and moving, uncompromising and open. I love how she combines her fierce intelligence with something raw, physical and sensuous."  Continued...

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