By Kristen Nevarez Schweizer
February 16, 2026
Plays by Henrik Ibsen typically feel like a stressful slow burn; a bedside candle lit dangerously close to the curtains. In The Old Globe’s new Hedda Gabler, ruthlessly condensed to a breathless 90-ish minutes by Erin Cressida Wilson, the tensions don’t build—they strangle. Hedda’s chokehold refuses to let go until you’re standing, applauding, gasping for air, and buzzing in that specific, confused way after a show intentionally cheats you out of catharsis.
No intermission. No relief valve. Then it’s over.
Artistic Director Barry Edelstein’s Hedda Gabler follows Hedda Tesman, newly married and newly miserable, as she realizes that respectable domestic life feels like a prison. Brilliant, bored, and desperate for control, Hedda manipulates the people around her—her well-meaning husband and his aunt, old lovers, and a rival woman—using emotional games as her only form of power.
Katie Holmes is the perfect casting choice because her audience is primed. Holmes has spent decades navigating the strange overlap between private self and public projection. Her Hedda knows how to be charming, but she just doesn’t see the point anymore. Holmes plays her with a cool, coiled energy—someone who has mastered the art of being popular and adored, and is bored to death by it.
I adored how unapologetically unlikeable this Hedda is allowed to be. She’s manipulative. She’s cruel. She’s post-mean-girl phase, now at a full-send pursuit of what she thinks power or freedom or thrill might finally feel like. And the production doesn’t rush in to justify her or soften the blow when she makes a final, devastating choice to reclaim her agency on her own terms.
From a visual standpoint, Mark Wendland’s set is the opposite of the usual aspirational domesticity of Ibsen’s living-room sets. His bare stage, with exposed proscenium lighting, is stark, chilly, and aggressively uncozy. Wendlent’s bold choice to be unlikeable turns out to be downright feminist.
Costume designer David I. Reynosa is known for excellent gowns, and he gives Holmes stunning, sensual, structured dresses that catch the light, flatter the figure, and constrict the body. Reynosa’s eye for power dressing recalls his work on Lady Macbeth with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, the gowns sculpting Holmes into authority even as they quietly restrict her breath, motion, and escape.
I didn’t want to see this show in the Globe’s expansive Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage because it lacked the claustrophobia it could have had in the intimate, 250-seat Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre. Edelstein’s Hedda crackles with a dark sense of curiosity and play that would have been more cutting up close. Still, it slices memorably. This is feminism without a halo: the radical permission to let a woman be messy, destructive, and wrong without demanding she be redeemed for our comfort.
February 7 – March 22, 2026
Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage
Old Globe Theatre
Conrad Prebys Theatre Center
World premiere
Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler
In a new version by Erin Cressida Wilson
Directed by Barry Edelstein
