Katie Holmes has a date with the stage in Southern California.
The veteran star is set to topline a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s iconic work Hedda Gabler at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. The casting reunites Holmes with the Globe’s artistic director, Barry Edelstein, who directed her in the Off-Broadway production of The Wanderers in 2023.
Hedda Gabler will kick off the 2026 season on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage at the Old Globe Theatre, part of the Globe’s Conrad Prebys Theatre Center in San Diego’s Balboa Park. Performances begin Feb. 7 and will continue through March 8. Opening night is Feb. 12.
Edelstein will direct the fresh take, which was commissioned by the Globe and adapted by veteran playwright and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, whose long list of feature film credits includes Secretary, Men, Women & Children, The Girl on the Train, Chloe and Snow White. For the stage, she has penned Hands, Wilder, Stop All the Clocks, The Trail of Her Inner Thigh, The Erotica Project, Hurricane, My Girl is in Front and others.
Holmes will star as the title character in the story of what happens when Hedda and her husband, George Tesman, return from their honeymoon with cracks in their union already showing. Bored and restless, she tries to control those around her but as her schemes tighten, her own world begins to unravel.
“Hedda Gabler is one of the landmark works of world drama and I’m truly thrilled to bring a bracing new take on it to the Globe,” said Edelstein, who serves as the Erna Finci Viterbi artistic director at the Globe. “Like all of Ibsen’s plays, this one is obsessed by how the choices we make in our pasts come back around to shape our present. That’s why it’s so fun that it reunites me with two artists I’ve had significant collaborations with over the years. One is playwright and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, who renews this classic through her frank and dynamic voice, with incendiary results. The other is a major figure in American film, TV, and theatre, the wonderful Katie Holmes.”
Edelstein continued: “Hedda, like Hamlet, rises or falls with the actor in the title role. She’s everything: victim, tyrant, femme fatale, funny, scathing, tragic. Only an actor with immense imagination and charisma can take on Hedda Gabler, and in Katie’s radiant and powerful performance, Globe audiences are going to witness something rare and special. She’s an artist at the height of her powers and we’re lucky to have her in San Diego.”
Norwegian scribe Ibsen debuted Hedda Gabler in 1891. The work’s Wikipedia page is dense as it’s been adapted, staged and reinterpreted countless times over the years. A long list of Hollywood stars have stepped into the title role, among them Anne Meacham, Ingrid Bergman, Peggy Ashcroft, Diana Rigg, Glenda Jackson, Isabelle Huppert, Kate Burton, Kelly McGillis, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Jane Fonda, Annette Bening, Judy Davis, Emmanuelle Seigner, Mary-Louise Parker, Harriet Walter, Rosamund Pike, Cate Blanchett and others.
More information on casting and the show’s creative team will be announced at a later date. Hedda Gabler is supported by lead production sponsor, the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director Fund. Additional support comes from the City of San Diego and the Theodor and Audrey Geisel Fund.
Holmes is currently shepherding Happy Hours, a feature film she is directing from her own script. She also stars opposite Joshua Jackson, Mary-Louise Parker, Constance Wu and Jack Martin, among others.
