Thursday, August 21, 2008

Mary Louise Parker in "Hedda Gabler"

2nd\NE Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

Product Description

"Hedda Gabler" is one of Henrik Ibsen's greatest dramas. It is the story of its title character, Hedda, a self-centered manipulative woman who has grown tired of her marriage. To escape her boredom she begins to meddle in the lives of others with truly tragic results. Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" is a monumental achievement in dramatic tragedy. -- Amazon

Synopsis

In 1890, Henrik Ibsen premiered Hedda Gabler, a play questioning the role of women in Victorian society. Some audiences have viewed Gabler as a woman driven to desperation simply because her world has turned out to be less charmed than she hoped. For others, she is a victim of her times, unwilling to devote herself, as was expected of her, to the duties of home. Jon Robin Baitz has brushed away the cobwebs, and he serves as an ambassador from Ibsen's age to our own, preserving the intensity of the original but translating it into a spare, contemporary idiom. His adaptation provides an opportunity to understand the play through a lens shaped by feminism and a theatrical tradition beginning with Beckett. Trapped by the conventions of her age, Gabler is both a martyr and a female incarnation of Vladimir and Estragon, longing for a salvation that will likely never arrive. -- B&N

...stunning...amazingly contemporary in its considerations of the purpose of life, of the preservation of dignity and integrity...the big issues people don't dare to think about. And here is a staging that does not turn away... -- New York Times

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