Kate Burton Stars in 'Hedda Gabler'

NEW YORK, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- Kate Burton, the post-ingenue actress daughter of Richard Burton, reaches for a dimension of her father's fame with mixed success in an underwhelming new staging of Henrik Ibsen's 1890 drama, "Hedda Gabler," now playing at the Ambassador Theater.

As directed by Nicholas Martin in a colloquial translation by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, this production of Ibsen's dark classic is less of the Victorian period and more of our own time in its verbal expressions and even its perspective, which finds humor in its heroine that Ibsen most certainly never intended.

Burton has made her mark on Broadway in the surgeon-general nominee role in "An American Daughter" and as a replacement in the title role of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," which she also played on tour in the United Kingdom and Ireland. She is probably best known to American audiences as an assistant district attorney on the popular television series, "The Practice."

Burton plays Hedda broadly and without the character's inherent mystery, probably the fault of direction by Martin who has been quoted as saying Hedda was "the only woman in Scandinavia with a sense of humor." Even Baitz has said his translation should help "knock Hedda Gabler off her pedestal" by humanizing her.

Burton delivers Hedda's belittlingly witty lines in a flippant manner that begs for laughs from an audience that should be cringing from their acidity. She also endows her terminally bored and unhappy heroine with Bette Davis mannerisms right out of "The Little Foxes" that make Hedda more of a neurotic caricature than a frigid, deeply disturbed woman.

Hedda is a young bride. Burton is a beautiful, red-haired woman of 44 but cannot help but appear more mature than her husband, George Tesman, who is played with more than necessary callowness by Michael Emerson. Ibsen intended for Hedda to be tougher and more emotionally sophisticated than Tesman but hardly older, and most actresses who have taken the role on Broadway have been in their late 20s.

That aside, Burton turns in a performance as a cruelly destructive, frigid femme fatale that demonstrates her ability to get inside a role and live her character. She is an intelligent actress, and if the right roles come her way in the future, she may yet become one of the great ladies of the American theater.

This production comes to Broadway by way of Massachusetts'Williamstown Theater Festival, where Burton's husband, Michael Ritchie, is producer and her half-sister, Amy Christopher, is casting director, and the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y., where her mother, Sybil Christopher, is artistic director. You might call it a family enterprise.

Casting is not one of this production's greatest strengths. Particularly disappointing is the performance of veteran actor Harris Yulin as Judge Brack, the elderly but still lustful attorney who gets control over the manipulative Hedda when he learns she has committed a criminal act and does not report it to the authorities.

Yulin never makes Brack a real threat to Hedda sexually as Ibsen has written, and he never elevates this pivotal character, who triggers Hedda's suicide, above the level of lassitude. This causes the drama to lose some of its sense of sense of evil at work and takes the chill off Hedda and Brack's final interview that prepares the audience for the tragic ending.

David Lansbury works hard at the role of Eilert Lovberg, the reformed rake who has become a rising author and whose only manuscript of a promising new book Hedda destroys in a moment of twisted jealousy. But he is miscast, not being handsome enough or sexy enough for the part. His moment of passion with Hedda is more sweatily loutish than romantic.

Jennifer Van Dyck is an unexpectedly pretty and sympathetic Mrs. Elvsted, Lovberg's steadying true love whose friendship Hedda betrays. Van Dyk plays the part with a conviction that makes a somewhat thankless role into one of mesmerizing interest. Another fully realized characterization is that Angela Thornton's Julia Tesman, George Tesman's saintly aunt who never lets Hedda forget that a little Tesman heir is expected of her.

Emerson, remembered for his brilliant Oscar Wilde in "Gross Indecency" on Broadway, gives a very studied performance as Tesman, making him more of a buffoon than a young man too much in love to recognize his wife's inability to reciprocate. It is impossible to feel anything for him but contempt, even though he deserves our compassion as Hedda's blindest victim.

Set designer Alexander Dodge's sparsely furnished, high-ceilinged drawing room in an 18th century mansion in Christiana, Norway, is just elegant enough to make us realize that Tesman, a poorly paid academic, probably can't afford it, although he thinks it the perfect setting for his jewel of a wife. Lighting by Kevin Adams is important in suggesting the increasingly prison-like feeling Hedda has for her honeymoon home.

Michael Krass' costumes conjure up the formality of the period perfectly, and Peter Golub's incidental music does much to reinforce the artificialities of an era when women were expected to be useful and charming appendages to their husbands, any hint of feminist independence was thwarted, and a life of submission wasn't worth living for the Hedda Gablers of this world.