Review: Katie Holmes wages sexual warfare in energized new Hedda Gabler adaptation

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If Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” seems to crop up more often than his other plays, it’s probably because of the enigmatic hold the chilling title character has on actresses and audiences alike.Katie Holmes, who has come a long way since her days on “Dawson‘s Creek,” is the latest to take on the Hedda challenge.She stars in a new version of the play by Erin Cressida Wilson that compresses the action and sharpens the language to a razor’s edge.

Hedda’s aberrant behavior now has the power to provoke an F-bomb, though the period of Barry Edelstein’s production at the Old Globe hasn’t otherwise been radically updated.The scenic decor and costumes situate us in the late 19th century of Ibsen’s bourgeois Norway.Ibsen, it turns out, doesn’t need his layers of exposition.

European auteurs, such as Thomas Ostermeier and Ivo van Hove have had great success burning through the texts to reveal the visceral clashes of characters whose souls are on the line along with their ideologies.The setting needn’t be explicitly Norway, but the stultifying strictures of this middle-class world must be in place for Ibsen’s vision to have its detonating effect.I once saw a production of “Hedda Gabler” on Broadway that could have taken place in contemporary Southern California, a choice that led me to wonder why Hedda didn’t just hop on a plane and leave her staid, suffocating surroundings for a more congenial situation elsewhere.

That Hedda doesn’t have unlimited options is an essential part of her tragedy.Trapped in a life inimical to her sensibility, she becomes an arsonist of the home that has been made at exorbitant expense to keep her satisfied.But satisfaction isn’t in the cards for this general’s daughter, famed for her beauty and imperious style.

She has married a conventional husband, George Tesman (Charlie Barnett), not for love but for security.Time ra...