From pot-peddling to pistol-packing — a snappy little change of pace she has set up for herself, you must admit. Here, her criminal duplicity is confined to leveling the opposite sex. One despondent suitor she sends off into the dead of night with the sweetest of smiles and one of her daddy's dueling pistols (make of it what you will). Then, adding insult to mortal injury, she flings his heart-and-soul manuscript — a metaphoric "love child" he has with his smitten collaborator — into the stove. Fini.
All this from a woman who has just waltzed down the aisle (albeit, with a malleable milquetoast). But the honeymoon is emphatically over and its glow long-gone as Henrik Ibsen begins his play. Parker roams her cavernous new digs with livid discontent, conveying silently a black mood that grows blacker with human contact.
"That was my idea," Parker beamed proudly at the after-party at Planet Hollywood where they served beer, wine and "Hedda's Last Shot" (a citrus vodka concoction).
The idea of doing Ibsen's horror show of a heroine in the first place was something dreamed up by Todd Haimes, Roundabout Theatre Company's artistic director. "Todd talked me into it," she relayed, "and he's so articulate and passionate. I've always wanted to work with, and for, him. His excitement about it was just infectious."
She even bothered to learn to play the piano for the part. "I told my teacher, 'I want to learn Chopin in three months.' At first, she said, 'Well, I dunno,' then she said, 'But I feel like you can do it for some reason. You seem like you can.' And I did! "All of it was hard, and every night it changes, but the other actors are so amazing. I feel like they kinda eased me through it. I've really never loved a cast this much."
The biggest hurdle perhaps was posed by the actress' contemporary track-record, but she claimed she didn't have to work overtime to keep modern mannerisms out of 19th century Norway. "I was trained in a conservatory. I started out my career doing classics. I have the technique to do classical theatre. I thought I was going to spend my whole career in a corset. But it's new plays that excite me the most."
That being the case, it must have been soothing for her to have on board, adapting Ibsen, one of the most prolific and praised of the new playwrights, Christopher Shinn, who specializes in edgy, urban, contemporary dramas that seem much removed from Ibsen's world. Not so, the adapter contends.
Firstly, "Ibsen's my favorite writer, and, when he wrote this play, it was about urban, hip people in a sense. Hedda Gabler was quite unique for her time so I don't think that it's too different from what I write. I was really interested in the challenge of bringing the work alive for an audience in 2009, making it more than a museum production."
To that end, he had the help of Anne-Charlotte Harvey, who supplied the literal translation and is credited (in teensy agate type) on the title page of the Playbill.
"I don't speak Norwegian," Shinn freely admitted, "so I work from a literal translation. You have to filter through yourself. You really do. Even when you're trying to realize somebody else's vision, it all has to come through you. I did feel I had to make it a very personal experience, not just an intellectual one."
The title character did get some nips and tucks. "I think we tried to give the most balanced Hedda we could in the script. She's quite hard in the script. We've made some of her jibes softer than Ibsen did because I think, over time, the character has become a kind of monster, a steam-roller. We wanted to soften her around the edges in parts to emphasize some other elements of her. I still think she is a hard character, a mean character in general, but we weren't trying to emphasize that."
Parker was attached to the project when he signed on so he knew who he was writing for, and the actress had quite a lot of input on the ground-floor level.
"We sat around her kitchen table and talked about it and thought about it and worked on it together. Really, we stayed very close to the Ibsen — we cut quite a lot — but I don't think we invented much at all. It was really about finding what in the Ibsen could match Mary-Louise's voice in a way that felt really truthful to both."
Shinn's recent opus was set in this century and opened abroad. "I had a play in London in the fall that did really well, Now or Later. It had a very sold-out extended run at the Royal Court, and hopefully somebody will do it here in New York."
Shinn was one of the safe-to-proceed factors for Paul Sparks, an Off-Broadway vet who is creating his first Broadway role as Hedda's thoroughly doused old-flame.
[flipbook] "I'd never seen this play — I know it's weird, right? — but I really love it," he said. "I think Ibsen was writing really dangerous stuff back then. It's very similar to what Chris and Adam Rapp and Craig Wright and those people I work with a lot are writing, and so I jumped at the chance." It seemed like an easy jump for him, just camouflaged as a classic. "I haven't done them in a really long time. When I first got out of school, I did some Shaw and some Shakespeare, but in New York it has been all downtown all the time all new plays — so, yes, it's a different thing for me to do."
Ana Reeder is a young innocent who quietly pines for Sparks' character (but not so quietly that it gets by Hedda and triggers her wrath). "I know she's a bit of an anachronistic kind of woman, but I love her courage and her abandon. I love the fight in her, that she wants to love willy-nilly. So I cherish her and the opportunity to try to advocate for her on stage and make people understand what drives her." Scholarly nerds are not in Michael Cerveris' repertoire so he surprises as Hedda's battered new spouse. He even sacrificed his mojo more by growing five-o'clock stubble on his usually slick and spotless pate. "I love that there's not an attempt to clean everybody up and make 'em perfect. They're very ragged, people living very close to out of control all the time. I think that's reflected all throughout the show.
"I haven't done a role like this before," he seemed happy to say, "and it's not the role people would expect me to be playing in it, which I find real exciting. I like the challenge, that it is not an easy thing for me to play, that I had no idea what to do with it when I first started. I like breathing real flesh-and-blood life into a character that I think sometimes can come off as a bit of a joke on the page and a bit pale. I like trying to surprise people with it. There's no singing my way out of this one!"
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"This summer I'm going to the Guthrie to do When We Are Married, a Priestley play. I've wanted to work at the new Guthrie since they built it, and this is my first chance."
She also has a film coming out in the summer, "Julie & Julia," about Julia Child. "Half of the film takes place in 1948-53, and Meryl Streep is playing Julia, and I play one of the co-authors of 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking.' I'm French in that one."
Lois Markle is the maid who tidies up the stage (but doesn't touch the emotional mess on it), and she fussily assists Parker in an on-stage dress-change. "That's terrifying — I'm not a dresser," she shuddered. Otherwise, she said she enjoyed the experience: "It was wonderful. I really loved the director [camera-shy Ian Rickson, M.I.A. the whole night as he was at the opening of his recent revival of The Seagull]. The company is fantastic — intelligent, warm and friendly — what could be better?"
The only authentic Scandinavian on stage was Peter Stormare, who played the lecherous and hypocritical judge who's on to Hedda's skullduggery and, like Addison DeWitt, can bottom it. The real accent gives him a very unique oddness. Liza Minnelli, thoroughly rested from her Palace laurels and looking regal in a feathery designer coat, led the big parade of celebs who turned out to watch Parker go to the dark side. In this case, it was tit for tat: Parker had attended Minnelli's opening. "Oh, she was one of my best friends," said Minnelli, who, with her musical director Billy Stritch, braved the bitter cold to have their intermission cigarettes.
Most of Cynthia Nixon's co-stars in Roundabout's upcoming Distracted made the scene: Peter Benson, Mimi Lieber, Aleta Mitchell and Shana Dowdeswell.
Celebrating Sparks' success at his table was the Becky Shaw contingent (including his girlfriend, title-player Annie Parisse, playwright Gina Gionfriddo and Emily Bergl.)
Also in his corner: playwright-pal Rapp and his girlfriend Katharine Waterston. Rapp said, "I'm finishing the second play of a trilogy called The Hallway Trilogy. It's going to be done next spring. They are three plays set in the same hallway, separated by 50 years. The first one is 1953. The second one is the night of the New York City blackout in 2003. And the third one is 2053. It's the same tenement hallway on the Lower East Side of New York City. It's a pretty large cast, and it's going to be done in rep, with the actors doing three different roles."
Michael Shannon, who co-starred with Sparks and David Wilson Barnes in Wright's recently acclaimed Lady at the Rattlestick, was there too, still grinning over the Oscar nomination he just got for "Revolutionary Road": "It was a dream part for me. I'm a huge fan of the book. When I got this part, I was just like a little kid in a petting zoo. I wasn't expecting [the Oscar nom] at all. I stayed out till three in the morning the night before because I thought I'd be able to sleep in, and then they ambushed me."
He doesn't have any theatre lined up at the moment, but he feels sure that will change soon: "I can't go more than a year without doing a play."
In Cerveris' camp was John Doyle, who directed him in a couple of Sondheims (Sweeney Todd and, most recently, Road Show). His irons in the fire are all in England. "I'm working on several things, but not in New York."
Tiny but mighty Tovah Feldshuh was talking up her Broadway return like nobody's business: "Irena's Vow starts rehearsal Feb. 17 and opens March 10 at the beautiful Walter Kerr Theatre. We have gone there. I have chosen my paint-chip for my walls, my new carpet — they're giving me a fridge, a microwave, a new couch and window treatment. And please, Heaven, that we will be there for a long run!"
Terrence McNally said he'll be doing double duty on the West Coast this year. In the spring, his Unusual Acts of Devotion with Faith Prince and Richard Thomas, which premiered last fall at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, will be staged and worked on at La Jolla Playhouse before heading to New York next season. In August, his musical with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Catch Me If You Can, will officially lift off at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre.
Also attending: Blythe Danner (London-bound to see the grandkids), Jim Dale, Amy Irving and hubby, plus Lily Rabe and Kieran Campion (arriving after their American Plan performance ran its course), Penny Fuller, Jessica Hecht and Becky Ann Baker (plotting a fourth stage teaming), Dana Ivey, Pal Joey himself Matthew Risch, Joan Rivers, Speech and Debate author Stephen Karam, Speech and Debate actor Gideon Glick, director Mark Brokaw and Kathleen Marshall, Tony Roberts, Scott Ellis, Ben Walker, Byron Jennings and Equus' Carolyn McCormick, playwrights J. T. Rogers and John Weidman, set designer Scott Pask, James Ludwig, Darren Goldstein and Katie Finneran, Mamie Gummer and director Michael Greif.
