Who is Hedda Gabler?
It’s a question Katie Holmes asked herself every day in rehearsals over the past month at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego’s Balboa Park. And every day, she said, the answer became a little more clear.
The famed film, TV and stage actor leads the cast of the Globe’s season-opening production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1890 Norwegian drama “Hedda Gabler,” which opened in previews Saturday. The production features a newly comissioned version of the script by screenwriter and playwright Erin Cressida Wilson.
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Hedda — the bored, mercurial and vicious wife of a mediocre academic — is known as the Hamlet of women’s roles because it’s widely considered the most complex female part ever written for the stage.
For Holmes, who is tackling Ibsen for the first time, said Hedda is the biggest theatrical challenge she has ever faced. But instead of being a daunting experience, she said of the discovery process: “it’s just been a joy.”
“It’s one day at a time for sure. It’s a big mountain to climb,” Holmes said, in a Zoom interview during a rehearsal break on Jan. 27. “It’s been really great to have Erin’s adaptation and have her in the room to talk through all the nuances and all the different layers. And I’m also being gentle with myself in my ability to absorb everything and let it come out.”
Katie Holmes as Hedda Gabler, left, and Charlie Barnett as George Tesman, with Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Aunt Julie Tesman seated behind them in rehearsal for The Old Globe’s production of “Hedda Gabler.” (Sandy Huffaker)
Old Globe debut
Holmes is best known for playing Joey Potter in the popular TV series “Dawson’s Creek” (1998-2003). But she has also appeared over the years in multiple Broadway plays, including the revivals of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” in 2008 and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” in 2024.
It was Holmes’ work in an off Broadway production, Anna Ziegler’s “The Wanderers” in 2023, that ultimately brought her to the Old Globe and “Hedda Gabler” this winter.
Barry Edelstein, who has served as artistic director at the Globe since 2012, commissioned and directed “The Wanderers” 2018 premiere in San Diego. Five years later he directed the play at New York’s Roundabout Theatre, where Holmes starred in the play as Julia, a mysterious film star. Holmes and Edelstein enjoyed their collaboration on the play so much that they vowed to work together again some day. That day has come.
Director Barry Edelstein and actor Katie Holmes, back row second and third from left, with the cast of Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2023 production of Anna Ziegler’s “The Wanderers.” (Tricia Baron)
“Katie is the world’s nicest human being,” Edelstein said. “It was one of those experiences where we were very happy. We enjoyed working with each other and we trusted each other.”
So, when “The Wanderers” was wrapping up, Edelstein handed Holmes a list of potential plays he’d like to direct her in at the Globe. “Hedda Gabler” was on the list. It’s a role Edelstein describes as “Hamlet for women … on the one hand arresting and on the other hand intimidating.”
But Holmes wasn’t intimidated and said she’d be game to give it a go if Edelstein was in the director’s chair.
“It’s a big challenge and I thought, ‘well if I’m going to do it, I want to do it with Barry.’ He’ll be very helpful and supportive and he will guide me,” she said.
Fortunately, her hopes became reality. She described rehearsals at the Globe as “great” and “formative.”
“Barry is really wonderful with actors. He teaches us so much and gives us space to try things and figure things out. So it’s been a wonderful collaboration,” she said.
Playwright and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the new version of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” that will premiere this month at The Old Globe in San Diego. (Erin Cressida Wilson)
A modern voice
Edelstein said that whenever he chooses a play that wasn’t originally written in English, he likes to commission a new translation or adaptation. For this project he called up an old friend, Wilson.
They had worked together on one of her women-centric plays in the 1990s, before she gave up the theater to became a very successful Hollywood screenwriter. She wrote the screenplay for the 2025 live-action “Snow White,” and the screen adaptations for the 2016 film “The Girl on the Train” and 2002 film “Secretary.”
Edelstein said Wilson’s new version of “Hedda” is faithful to Ibsen’s original script, but it will sound more modern. It also reflects Wilson’s background as a potent and feminist storyteller.
“Erin made it her own,” Edelstein said. “It’s not like she has changed the plot or added or deleted characters. But it’s filtered through her sensibility, which is contemporary. She blew the dust off the thing and rendered the language in a way that’s very spare, very muscular.”
Wilson said having the opportunity to take on “Hedda Gabler” was an offer she couldn’t refuse.
Although she said she “divorced the theater” 20 years ago because she was tired of the rejection and financial struggles, she decided to rekindle that romance for “Hedda.” “I finally felt like the line has been drawn long enough, and this is the project.”
And why “Hedda Gabler”?
“It’s a giant,” Wilson said of the play. “It’s a complicated psychological masterpiece about the state of a caged woman who is complicated and has conflicts and desires that are full of mystery and full of rage and full of the desire for joy and destruction. I don’t think there’s an intelligent woman out there who doesn’t relate to Hedda at some point. Her situation is that there’s very little patience for the complexity of female desire. There still isn’t.”
Wilson said the immediacy of her script connects with how Hedda isn’t simply an antiquated character from the past but someone women today can identify with.
“She’s all of us,” Wilson said. “She’s the modern woman who thinks she has freedom and then realizes, ‘My God I don’t. I was told I did. Everybody acted like I did. But here I am trapped and everybody wants me to behave like the way a woman is supposed to act.’”
Wilson said that her version of the script has dialogue that’s less rigid and old-fashioned and sounds more human.
“People today don’t say what they think all the time. They repeat things. They ask questions. They don’t listen to each other. I tried to take all these lesson and bring them to the script.”
Holmes said she loves the propulsive, almost musical quality of Wilson’s script.
“One of the things I love about Erin’s writing is that it’s intentional in its service to story, but it’s melodic in the rhythm of speech,” Holmes said. “That’s not easy to do. I love the way she writes things. I love to say her words.”
Wilson said she has relished reuniting with Edelstein, both in the rehearsal room and in the script-shaping process. She said he deserves equal credit for her script adaptation.
“He is a phenomenal collaborator and passionate. I love being around someone who is so (expletive) smart. He’s so articulate, he knows how to word the most complex things that seem ethereal and brings it into a phrase,” Wilson said.
Edelstein said he was so inspired by Wilson’s script that he fashioned his vision for the production around it. In response to the spareness of the script, which will run a little over 90 minutes with no intermission, Edelstein said his staging will have a dark, stripped-away look so the audience can focus on the words and characters.
Wilson describes Edelstein’s directorial vision for the play as “like watching a waltz. It keeps moving and moving until it doesn’t.”
Barry Edelstein, artistic director of The Old Globe, will direct the season-opening production of “Hedda Gabler,” starring Katie Holmes. (Dominique Faubert)
Shock and awe
When Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” made its world premiere on Jan. 31, 1891, in Munich, Germany, the opening-night audience responded with both cheers and boos. Conservative critics were outraged at the immorality and unladylike behavior of the play’s title character, but disdain for the play was short-lived and it became a triumph across Europe. It’s still one of the most-performed non-Shakespeare plays in the world.
Set in Norway in the late 1800s in what is modern-day Oslo, the play is about the newlywed couple Hedda Gabler and George Tesman. Hedda is the beautiful and much-admired daughter of local aristocrat. But since she is 29 and had no other suitors, she has married the dull and unaccomplished Tesman, who she has grown to hate. Feeling bored, resentful and trapped by domestic life, Hedda hatches a plan to destroy her husband’s potential career rival, Eilert Lovberg, who happens to be her ex-lover. But instead of succeeding in her quest, Hedda ends up boxed in by her own scheme.
Edelstein said Holmes has proven perfect for the part of Hedda because she can instantly win over the audience with her charm and beauty before the fissures in her character’s soul become apparent.
“Katie is a revelation in the role because she’s extremely charismatic,” said Edelstein. “She doesn’t have to act that. She’s a big movie star who is radiant and breathtaking when you’re around her. She’s this magnetic force drawing people toward her. … She’s absolutely a tyrant and cruel to people and physically abusive to people in the script. But what you get from Katie is that what’s happening is because (her Hedda) has an imagination that is too great for the provincial college town she lives in. That’s the source of the tension and the fireworks in the play.”
Wilson said she was thrilled to watch Holmes take on the role of Hedda and imbue the character with authenticity and humanity.
“Nobody can be better at being human than Katie. She’s exceptionally relatable,” Wilson said. “She can be so mercurial and so surprising. She’s like watching a dance … It’s so in her blood and has been since the first time she read it. The performance just sort of swims out of her and you don’t think about it. You’re just inside her.”
“I call the way that Katie plays Hedda ‘a kaleidoscope of Hedda,’” Wilson said. “I think clearly the entire play revolves around her. The men surround her like bees coming to honey. It’s a really profound community event and Katie sort of sets the bar and is really the center of our community.”
Defining the role
Hedda Gabler has frequently been described over the past century as a monster because of how cruelly she manipulates and destroys people in the play.
Holmes said she sees the monster in Hedda, but Wilson’s script provides enough space for the audience to make up their own mind.
“It’s not a one-note monster,” Holmes said of the script. “I think what she has done has allowed me to see and understand why (Hedda) make these choices and where her rage is coming from. There is empathy to be had for her struggle and for the demons that she holds.
“What I like about this adaptation is we don’t see it coming right away. She’s not harsh from the beginning to the end, which I find to be interesting and more of a psychological thriller,” Holmes said.
Edelstein echoes her opinion of the nuances in Wilson’s script.
“Hedda is this mystery,” he said. “There’s something about her beyond our ability to understand. We’re trying to figure it out. She’s an uncommon outlandish person, a tyrant and victim at the same time who’s difficult and provocative.”
And now, after many weeks of inhabiting this character, Holmes said she has a much better understanding of who Hedda Gabler is.
“I think she’s a mastermind in many ways,” Holmes said. “She’s also deeply flawed and traumatized. We see that as the play unfolds … It’s making it a very big challenge to figure out when to reveal the fire in her. The monster. I am working hard to figure it out and try to hit all the notes in one evening. … It is a mountain, but I learn so much every time.”
‘Hedda Gabler’
When: Previews, today through Wednesday. Opens Thursday runs through March 15. 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: The Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $61 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org
