It is the fact that she could do much better than him that makes her marriage so convenient, but in trying to secure a novel type of freedom for a woman in a traditional world, Hedda enacts deceptions and schemes that tragically prove that she is limited to the confines of a “proper,” conservative patriarchy—driving her ultimately to tragic, bitter ends. When we end our short stay with Hedda, large fragments of her character still feel illegible—despite her dextrous command of euphemism and startling candidness in a repressed society. Stage directors and performers have attempted to excavate and animate that ambiguity, first dreamed up by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in Hedda Gabler, for over a century.