Were it not completely sold out, I would encourage everyone I know to go check out the Sydney Theater Company’s production of Hedda Gabler at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Cate Blanchett is acting a smoking hole through the center of the BAM Harvey stage in the title role. Her Hedda is by turns terrifying and trapped, violent and weak, petty and brave — all the contradictions held together in the form of a woman who has had to keep all of her anger and ambition inside, where it has rotted and leaked out as a pestilence.

The rest of the cast is fantastic, with a Tesman whom you can actually believe Hedda might have convinced herself she could be satisfied, and a completely unrecognizable Hugo Weaving playing Judge Brock as an utterly charming menace — a combination, I realized when I thought of it, of his two most common screen personae.

I was riveted to the stage by Blanchett’s performance most of all, and in no small part because I could not remember how the play ended. I haven’t read the thing in at least ten years, since I took a seminar in grad school on gender and the 1890s with Martha Vicinus. Vicinus is aptly immortalized in James Hynes’s novel The Lecturer’s Tale as a vampire turned department chair, about which the less said the better. She was also the only professor I ever had, in my all-too-lengthy education, who refused to approve a paper topic that was appropriate for the class because she just wasn’t interested (a New Historicist reading of James’s Portrait of a Lady: she told me she didn’t like James, so he was out of bounds. For a class on gender in the 1890s. Sound effect: my head exploding). So my memory of the class, and the rest of the reading, tends to be colored by her ability to suck the life out of the material we did cover. There was nothing bland about this production, though, and it added a lot to my enjoyment in the end to be watching it half-blind: for all the “aha, right, here we are” of the guns coming out in the first act, there was a “holy shit, that’s right, she destroys it” in the last. I had thought about seeing the awesome-sounding Heddatron before this (it has, sadly, already closed) but I’m glad I didn’t: I got to feel the force of Blanchett’s performance, and the vivid ferocity of the production, without newer memories cluttering my view.

Although I will admit, I do find myself wanting to reread Hynes, or at least the opening department meeting scene…