Mary-Louise Parker of Weeds fame is usually (and deservedly) a critics' darling. But her performance in the title role of the new Broadway revival of Hedda Gabler has been royally trashed. Ben Brantley in the NY Times says Parker "has traded in her usual air of easy, quirky spontaneity for the robotic petulance of an I-hate-everybody adolescent in a yearlong sulk." David Rooney of Variety says she plays Ibsen's tragic heroine as a "seething kook." Other reviews have been kinder to Parker, but not to the production.
In other NY theater news, Anne Bogart's SITI/ Women's Theater Project production of Virginia Woolf's only play Freshwater (which we wrote about here) was also the victim of a NY Times pan. Sorry, Virginia.