“Hedda Gabler” at Yale Rep

Robert Schneider in Connecticut
9 December 2025
★★★★★ 

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has often been produced as a tragedy of female neurosis and alienation. The title character has been portrayed as deluded and disaffected, an aristocratic echo of Emma Bovary. The production now on view at Yale Rep, in a new translation by Paul Walsh, is more political; Hedda is a superior woman whose moves are blocked by a devoted-but-oblivious husband, a brilliant-but-alcoholic ex-lover and a manipulative judge. The men aren’t better than Hedda, but they get all the breaks because the game is played on their table. Norway is their fiefdom. 

Austin Durant and Max Gordon Moore.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus.

Scenic designer Jessie Baldinger brings the fiefdom indoors, a drawing room that is rich and dark in equal measure, putatively a woman’s domain but with strong masculine traits. Baldinger’s fully realized set, complete with cornices, a ceiling piece, and artful devices to conceal Larry Ortiz’s lighting instruments, conforms to a near-forgotten standard of theatrical realism in the same way that Hedda is asked to conform to standards of behaviour current in the society of her time. The air in the drawing room is heavy with repressed sexuality and smoke from the men’s cigars and Hedda’s cigarettes.  

Hedda’s dresses, a tour de force from costume designer Lyle Laize Qin, become darker and more restrictive in each act. When we first see her, she’s wearing a pink, open-bodice gown with darker ruffles that frame her body in a long vee all the way to the floor. The image is stunningly vaginal. In the last act she’s in blood-red velvet over a dark red taffeta skirt covering a bustle. Over the course of the play, she is transformed from an open vulva to an open wound.  

The actor wearing these marvels is Marianna Gailus, 190 cm in her stocking feet but augmented with heels and wearing her hair up, she glides across the stage like the queen on a chess board. There is no king in sight. After Hedda burns Lovborg’s manuscript—an act she performs page by page with palpable delight—she embraces Tesman. She tells him she did it because she didn’t want to see him overshadowed, but it’s she who overshadows him—by five inches at least. The evening is full of moments like this: ironies whipped into soft peaks that break like wavelets and elicit gasps of laughter from the audience. We laugh in spite of the cruelty of it all, as if we suddenly realize a bullfight can be funny. 

Stephanie Machado and Marianna Gailus.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus.

Until the final act Gailus’ Hedda is like a sharp knife set provocatively beside a plate of un-shucked oysters. When she coaxes Thea Elvsted into staying home with her, she clucks at her as one might to a horse that checks at a gate. Only Austin Durant’s Judge Brack sees through her and divines the charade of her marriage to Tesman. When she tells him that she’d like to see her husband go into politics, he greets the news with a knowing chuckle: Tesman would be helpless in politics, but Hedda would excel. Diabolically cunning, driven to have her own way and instantly aware of the other characters’ weaknesses, Hedda Gabbler could be prime minister if only the strictures of the day allowed it.  

As Tesman, Max Gordon Moore is a perfect foil for her. Like Charles Bovary, his dull and dutiful approach to life sets off his wife’s reckless daring. As always at Yale Rep there were academics in the house; Moore’s performance, like his pedantry, landed almost too close to home. 

Stephanie Machado’s version of Thea would be an ideal wife for Tesman to the same degree that Hedda isn’t. Machado is like a college sophomore suddenly tapped for a mean girls’ sorority. Hedda dazzles her. Her innocence and good intentions are her only defence and they’re clearly not enough.  

Felicity Jones Latta as Tesman’s aunt and Mary Lou Rosato as his old nurse deliver the first act exposition so naturally and with such subtlety that we scarcely see it as exposition. They show us that Tesman has always been cared for; it’s his weakness as well as his strength. 

As Lovborg, James Udom is convincingly fascinated by Hedda, but it’s an open question whether she was ever fascinated by him. Walsh’s translation is frank about their past intimacy. Prudishly, most translators have Hedda complain that Lovborg “wronged” her. Walsh takes off the gloves and renders it “assaulted,” which I’m told is not a stretch from the original. Hedda subsequently threatened to shoot him, so maybe “assaulted” is the better choice? It’s all water under the bridge now—or is it? 

Having persuaded Lovborg to go to Judge Brack’s party, she orders him to come back “with vine leaves in your hair”. In her romantic quest for beauty, she makes a silly mistake: she confuses the laurel wreath of a Scandinavian scholar with the grape leaves of Dionysus. Why do intellectuals fall so hard for women who don’t read? And what does Hedda make of these men? The only thing she sees perfectly in Lovborg is how to destroy him. 

Seeing this masterful production—James Bundy’s last before he leaves Yale in the spring—one appreciates the abyss of boredom into which nineteenth-century century women might easily fall, a back-biting, gossipy boredom—albeit splendidly costumed—for which most modern women have little time or inclination. Nevertheless, one is compelled to admit that people of both sexes were more interesting then. Even Tesman, who embodies boredom for the others, is fully engaged in his research. The ennui that gnaws at nineteenth-century characters gives them an edge that our endless diversions, electronic and otherwise, have dulled. From the depths of boredom grow pinnacles of obsession and intrigue.  

Ibsen’s plots slice open his protagonists with the efficacy of a high-end food processor. Hedda is a queen until, quite suddenly, she isn’t. Yes, she has behaved very badly, but we love her regardless. She’s a cool cookie and a crack shot with her father’s pistols. She is understandably disappointed by the people around her. She knows they won’t change. Given other options, she would take them, but she refuses to settle for this.  

We could learn so much from Hedda Gabler.