Press Quotes
“… this profound play, in which Hedda’s contradictory desires both compel her and are concealed from her, foreshadows Freud’s notion of the unconscious … ‘Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves,’ Ibsen said. He, like Freud, was an archeologist of the modern psyche, one of those visionaries, as Freud observed, whose findings ‘troubled the sleep of the world’ … As someone who is always comparing herself with others, Hedda puts great store in appearances and in the show of propriety — she fears scandal. At the same time, she has a murderous, self-destructive heart that confounds her … For Hedda, everything that’s bright, joyful, life-giving, or creative is a target. In fact, the issue of creation lies at the heart of her barren landscape. At its most literal level, the plot turns on whether Hedda is pregnant or not. Throughout the play, Ibsen keeps the answer tantalizingly ambiguous. The other characters frequently raise the question; she just as frequently cuts those questions dead … She is not brave; she is reckless, a signal of her resignation. Her life is a living death, so she has nothing to lose … Hedda’s own suicide, when it comes, is not an act of contrition but an act of will, the only gesture of freedom left to her. It is intended as a perverse transcendence, a form of negative creation.” —John Lahr, The New Yorker