Word: hedda
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...this Los Angeles run that it has one actress on its roster with the special authority of a star, Maggie Smith. As Masha, flinging herself into the brief, doomed adulterous affair with Colonel Vershinin (Robert Stephens), she is the incandescent epitome of all women in love. Here is a Hedda Gabler of a Russian provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with a man who must leave her, she conveys a heartrending gallantry. Perhaps the saddest fate...
Defiance of Fate. Rebecca Thompson, who plays Hedda, is one of the singularly lovely women of the U.S. stage. Her head and profile are sculpted with the exquisite delicacy of a Tanagra figurine. Her performance is infused with intelligence. She is the embodiment of a woman who outwardly entices and inwardly rejects. She judges and rejects the men around her not because they are men, but because they do not measure up to her ideal. Her state of mind is not one of hysteria and frustration, but of wry, detached, ironic amusement, though occasionally her inability to suffer fools gladly...
What is insufferably painful for this Hedda is that she is totally aware of her predicament. She has aimed at the stars and settled for a cinder. Tesman, with his dusty burrowing in book after book, is not a spouse but a sedative. It is to Actor Peter Hansen's credit that he humanizes a library mole so that the audience can accord him the pity that Hedda withholds...
...scrupulously contained performance, Rebecca Thompson's Hedda is remarkably affecting and finally tragic. In part, this is due to Ted van Griethuysen, whose deliberate gravity of direction achieves cumulative emotional intensity. Hedda moves inexorably toward tragedy in that her ultimate foe is not the world of mere men but what O'Neill called "the God of Things as They Are." She regards suicide as the perfect act of courage because it is her non serviam to that god, her defiance of human fate...
...When Hedda Gabler's fatal pistol shot rang out offstage on opening night, a young woman in the second row quivered as if the bullet had entered her body, and the only sounds that those sitting near her heard thereafter, except for the last lines of the play, were her muffled sobs. On subsequent evenings, other women similarly wept. Laughter is always touted in the New York theater, but tears are too rare to go unmentioned. That is earned emotion, a spontaneous accolade to an extremely fine actress and a very great play...