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Last year, Broadway got Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull and Katie Holmes in All My Sons. In this month's lady-from-Hollywood-takes-on-an-English-class-classic, we have Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, Boys on the Side) as Henrik Ibsen's notoriously difficult (in every way that phrase can possible be meant) Hedda Gabler. Hedda is one of the most iconic female roles in Western theater--Cate Blanchett came to New York with her own version just two years ago. Former Slate movie critic David Edelstein has a great essay in New York this week that asks, "Why, in spite of everything, is Hedda still the most popular girl in her class—and can anyone manage to get her right?"
"They all want to play Hedda, the female stars of stage and screen unjustly deprived of characters in the canon with real stature—despite the fact that she is a borderline psycho who resists our sympathy, and that Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is an obstacle course over a minefield: creaky, exposition-laden, rife with the potential for unintentional laughs, bound by conventions of drawing-room realism. Beside Hedda, Hamlet is a walk in the park: At least he can talk to the audience, establish a rapport—help us to, you know, relate to his predicament. Chill Hedda is forever out of reach."
Edelstein is rather kinder to Parker than Ben Brantley was in the New York Times ("her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who's given up cheerleading to be a goth because it's way cooler and it matches the place her mind's at now"). His ideal Hollywood Hedda, though, might surprise you:
"The only living English-speaking star who seems a perfect match is—laugh all you like—Angelina Jolie. I have no idea if she has the theatrical chops (movie stars who rule in close-up—like Julia Roberts—have a way of shrinking onstage), but Jolie has the size, the unyielding self-containment, the take-no-prisoners craziness, the will of a temperamental Greek goddess .... She could demonstrate, definitively, just as Ibsen did, why Hedda is the most alive anti-heroine in modern drama: It's what happens when you put a very large spirit in a very small box."