The XX Factor: What women really think.

From the Culture Files...

Here's my culture question of the week: Is it possible to put on a good production of Hedda Gabler in an era when women have so many choices available to them? Hedda, after all, is one of Ibsen's great female characters, a restless housewife with an existential streak; she roams the rooms of her villa wondering how to achieve freedom. (A much more interesting version of the Betty character on Mad Men.)

I ask because on Saturday I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's new production of Hedda Gabler, starring Mary-Louise Parker. And I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since, because Parker's interpretation of Hedda is at once incoherent and fascinating. She plays Hedda with a detached, ironic anomie that illuminates the play's dry humor but makes it hard to understand the character's motivations (particularly her choice at the very end of the play). Afterward, I was reading about the play on the Web and saw that David Edelstein asks a version of this question is his sharp New York review of the Parker production. He's on to something interesting: Today, I think, contemporary movies, plays, and art are much more likely to depict trapped women in one of two distinct ways: Either they are trapped by social circumstances, trapped in a non-progressive society (think Betty in Mad Men) or they suffer from some existential ennui. (Think, I don't know, something like 4.48 Psychose.) But you rarely see a female character in which these two issues are blended together... Or do you? In any case, I think it gets to part of what makes Hedda so difficult to produce today.