It is unlikely that Henrik Ibsen's first audiences, watching Hedda Gabler in 1890s Norway, were familiar with the phrase "control freak." But since Jon Robin Baitz goes so far as to include the slangy demurral "no problem" in his carefully modernized translation of the play, employed for the current Broadway production, it doesn't seem inappropriate to call the smoldering heroine a control freak. After all, she does end her life with an inherited pistol when she realizes that her determination "to have some power over someone's destiny"--as she and Baitz phrase it--is doomed to fail.

Destiny has little currency in contemporary vocabularies, but that's the way Hedda sees things. She dies [...]