The company--which was entrenched in contemporary culture after Richard Burton said of Elizabeth Taylor, "The only word Liz knows in Italian is Bulgari"--used to house its U.S. headquarters on two non-contiguous floors at 730 Fifth Avenue.

Studley brokers Michael Goldman and Kunihiko Otomo represented Bulgari.

- John Koblin

No doubt old Henrik was capable of a light moment or two as the Norwegian nights were drawing in in Christiana. But the view that his dark, great masterpiece about one of the most fascinating and destructive heroines in all of drama amounts to a drawing-room comedy would surely leave any quite sane person reeling. God knows where it leaves Ibsen.

I'll come reluctantly to Ms. Burton's game, inadequate Hedda when my murderous mood has passed. Nicholas Martin's woefully provincial production at the Ambassador on Broadway is plain wrong in every detail, including the broad, foolish comedy played for all its worth between the "serious bits." At times, the audience is enjoying the action so much it's like watching Hedda Gabler with a laugh track. Actors can always stamp on inappropriate laughter-but not here. They're indulging the response because they believe it's the right one.

The question is why? A classic play messed with by simple-minded directors is becoming the norm, but how did it come to this? In a Times piece about the production, the director, Mr. Martin, explains: "I've always said that the tragedy of Hedda Gabler is that she's the only woman in Scandinavia with a sense of humor."

That's some unbelievable claim, but let it pass. The truth is that Hedda doesn't possess an authentic sense of humor. She has a cruel, belittling wit at the expense of all others, which is different. But Ms. Burton goes on to explain how Jon Robin Baitz, the adaptor of this colloquial Hedda , "helped her to knock General Gabler's destructive daughter off her pedestal." Mr. Baitz told her, "She's the funniest and smartest person in the room."

What next for Mr. Baitz-an adaptation of Peer Gynt subtitled "The Funniest and Smartest Person Up the Mountain"? But Hedda isn't "funny," least of all is she the "smartest." To the contrary, she has absolutely no control over anything-including her own instinctive, unconscious emotions and tragic destiny. The major theme of the play is her elemental, dangerous powerlessness. It's why we're fascinated by her, or should be. Smart? She's easily outwitted and entrapped by oily, predatory Judge Brack-the reason she ultimately shoots herself.

Hedda is an astonishing invention in so many ways. Ibsen must surely have been the first dramatist to dare to create a heroine whose calling card is boredom. Hedda is firstly a woman who's dying of boredom. That prolonged, endless six-month honeymoon with her adoring petit-bourgeois mediocrity of a husband, George Tesman, must have all but killed her. She's married her lapdog and thrown away her life.

This restless, complex woman is capable of anything. It's as if she's unevolved and subverted. She wants to defy petty convention, but lacks the courage. She fears scandal and ridicule. She fusses tactlessly over the correct place to leave a bonnet. She exclaims, like any dourly conventional housewife, "But what will people say!" Yet she begs to be a free

spirit and bitterly envies anyone who is. She's a jealous woman who destroys three lives-her husband, doomed from the start; her former beau, the rebel-genius Lovborg, whose love she spurned; and her childhood friend, meek Mrs. Elvsted, who loves and saves Lovborg.

Ibsen anticipates feminism with Hedda Gabler , and more so in the earlier A Doll's House ; without reading Freud, he anticipated modern psychology. But Hedda is less a social tract and symbol of suppressed Victorian womanhood, more a tragedy of the thwarted individual. She's a mercurial, pampered beauty who's a coward and admits it-a caustic egotist who must be the center of everyone's attention. Her cruelty is clear, as well as her untrustworthiness. She's frigid.

Hedda denies her own sexuality. She's repelled even by her pregnancy. When she burns the manuscript of Lovborg's unpublished masterpiece, she destroys his beautiful "child"-the priceless thing given birth to by Lovborg and the "inferior" Mrs. Elv-sted. Hedda is a voyeur who's disgusted by sex. She and Lovborg aren't about the loud, passionate clinches-the stolen kisses!-this production indulges in between them. Sex isn't what she wants, but ownership. She despises Lovborg's freedom.

The funniest, smartest girl in town? The misguided production tries to bring Hedda down to earth, which is the last place she should be. She brings herself down, but ordinariness isn't among her attributes. If it were, she would have settled comfortably for a nice, smug pseudo-contented life with Tesman, and we wouldn't have a play.

Ms. Burton (the daughter of Richard Burton) is a respected, well-liked actress, but her Hedda is a limited, unmysterious performance. I'm afraid that she gives us a blatant, smirking heroine who's as simplistic as everything else at work here. The laughs are glib (and milked). But there's an absence of all nuance and emotional sophistication. The glowering portrait of Hedda's father hovers over the proceedings-more than enough to suggest the psychologically obvious. Must she point a pistol at it like a gun-toting Annie Oakley? Hedda's restless, exasperated energy is clear, but is this enough reason for Ms. Burton to practically hang herself with the curtain drapes? Unless she was sort of draping herself in the drapes.

It's a melodramatic interpretation. When Hedda's eyes meet the tempestuous Lovborg (played most tempestuously by the histrionic David Lansbury), the silence between them is so intensely prolonged that I feared one of them must have gone up on their lines. But no, it was deliberate. It was The Look. It was The Look that spells Romance.

Perhaps the hack closing image-an old-fashioned Victorian tableau-tells us more than we might wish to know. Hedda has shot herself and, amidst great alarm, the doors to the anteroom open. Revealed improbably before us, Hedda is seated dead at the piano, but she's facing out to the audience with her arms splayed across the piano keys in a martyr-like pose. She must have shot herself very carefully .

We have a corrupt Judge Brack played by Harris Yulin, who's so sleepily lifeless that when Hedda threatened to shoot him , Mr. Yulin looked no more disturbed than someone who might have been hit by a playful paper dart. Jennifer Van Dyck's Mrs. Elv-sted-dressed in black as if in mourning for her life for some confused Chekhovian reason-is too much the victim. Meek or no, she's the one character who risks everything. Hedda's Tesman is a blind innocent, not the buffoon of Michael Emerson, whose pale-face childishness reminds one uncomfortably of Pee-wee Herman.

This third-rate Hedda Gabler left me downcast and unforgiving, as you can tell. Needless to say, the set, which should be claustrophobic, is light and airy. Dawns are blinding. The furniture, which should be sparse, is cluttered. Everything is bleached. If it's bleached, it must be Norway. But it isn't. It's Broadway, via the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, and let's leave it at that.

When you open the door, however, it's like walking into a gag from an old movie. The wall of noise hits you like a tidal wave.

Buena Vista Social Club was belting away on the loudspeaker one evening, and a Prada party was under way at tables that had been pushed together in front of the bar, which was thronged with pretty women in strapless tops and guys in leather jackets. My friends were standing there, looking a bit dazed. One of them was hanging on to a glowing pink drink. "It's a kamikaze!" she shouted, so I ordered one. It tasted like one of those sneaky tropical juice drinks they used to serve at Trader Vic.

We barely had time to feel the effect of our cocktails before a dark-haired beauty, dressed in what fashion magazines in the 50's used to call "a crisp white blouse," told us our table was ready. "It's the best one in the house," she said sweetly, leading us into the dining room to a horseshoe banquette in the corner.

Isla's décor evokes the 50's-Cuba in the heyday of the Battista regime, decadent nights at the Havana Yacht Club where sequins, mules and Merry Widow hats were more the order than crisp white blouses. The restaurant has been decorated with great style by the owner, Diane Ghioto, a former fashion editor at Elle , with architect Kate Webb. The floor is painted a brilliant cobalt blue, and orange globes are suspended from the ceiling on white nylon cords. The walls, blue-tiled or tobacco-brown, are hung with white light fixtures shaped like the petals of exotic tropical flowers, and lined with white leather banquettes and blue formica tables. By the bar-white Lucite, with white leather and chrome barstools-cocktail tables are set with orange plastic basket chairs from a poolside lounge in Miami.

You can imagine Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, on a romantic weekend, getting cheerfully plastered in this sort of setting-except for one thing. They probably liked to talk (at least, Burton certainly did), but in this room conversation is virtually impossible. The floor is poured concrete, the ceilings low, the walls tiled, the music high. I have never been to such a noisy restaurant in my life.

A loudspeaker above our table throbbed with Latin rhythms. The guy at the opposite table, who was wearing two pairs of glasses-one on his nose, the other on top of his bald head-seemed to be having a nice time, although he didn't say much to his friend, who had a rhinestone stuck in the center of his forehead. We asked the waitress, knowing it was futile, if she would turn the music down. She did, but it was not long before it was up to full volume again.

Isla's chef, Aarón Sanchez, says he uses "indigenous ingredients to demonstrate what contemporary Cuban cooking might have represented, had the country's recent history been different." He is well honed in pan-Latin cuisine, having worked at Patria, Erizo Latino and L-Ray, and he also happens to be the son of Zarela Martinez, the Mexican cooking authority and restaurant owner. His food is interesting and satisfying, and doesn't overreach in its effort to lighten and update Cuban food.

For 50 bucks, four people can start dinner by sharing a Latin version of a plateau de fruits de mer , a selection of ceviches and oysters. Our waitress brought over a platter and set it down in the middle of the table. "This one is …, that one is …,"she said, pointing to each one in turn. We couldn't hear a word of her explanation. "Would you like me to go over these again?" she asked. We just laughed.

There were four kinds of ceviche, and they were all delicious: slices of yellow tail in a soy sauce marinade; a creamy scallop dish; tender, lemony slices of squid; shrimp in a spicy cocktail sauce. The only disappointment was the oysters, Malpeques, which tasted muddy. Empanaditas, little stuffed pastry turnovers with salsa, were a trifle doughy as were the tostones rellenos, roulades made from plantains stuffed with beef picadillo.

But Mr. Sanchez uses Latin tubers to great effect, such as the wonderful mashed boniato which accompanies a grilled stuffed pork chop and tastes like a white sweet potato. Crisp yucca fries came with the charbroiled filet mignon (substituted on the current menu by the Angus strip steak), and a spicy picadillo of roasted squash beautifully complements the tamarind-glazed duck breast. "Drunken" chicken on the bone was given a jolt of flavor from a marinade of spices, rum and citrus, and it was excellent. One of my favorite dishes was the juicy head-on shrimp rolled in a crust of crushed fried plantain and served on a bed of peppery garbanzo rice. Mr. Sanchez is terrifically good at rice; it was the high point of his paella, the creamy grains lightly tinged with saffron and topped with tiny clams, chorizo, roasted peppers, mussels and shrimp. This was a better choice than the seasonal fish, a bland red snapper (since replaced with a wild striped bass). It came with scalloped potatoes perked up with a layer of salt cod (a play on brandade morue ), which gave it some zest; the mustard greens and a salsa verde made from tomatillos, green chilies and cilantro also helped.

While we were trying to enjoy our food, conversation became increasingly exhausting. It was like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner who doesn't speak your language, where every shouted word assumes a significance out of all proportion.

By the time dessert arrived, we were ready to put on woolly pajamas and retire. But the dark, fudgy chocolate cake with guava sauce and a chocolate starfish, and the pineapple tarte Tatin with rich coconut ice cream, were both delicious homey desserts with a Latin twist. A butterscotch custard, with gingersnap crackers, was also great. But don't bother with the bread pudding, which tasted like raw dough and was so heavy it would send Castro to bed with his boots on.

With dessert, our waitress suggested we try one of their special teas, which cost $7.50 or $8 a cup. "It's an unusual experience. You have it, like, once in a lifetime," she said as she set down two glasses of hot water with something gray floating in them like children's paper flowers. "Let them steep."

My friend looked at her glass. It appeared to have a small fright wig at the bottom, which was actually a green sea anemone.

"I'm not drinking it," she said, pushing it away. "It looks like a spider. I hate spiders."

So I drank it. It had a faint, flowery aroma, and I found it a warm, soothing antidote to all the noise.

ISLA

*

39 Downing Street

between Bedford and Varick streets

352-2822

Dress: Downtown chic

Noise level: Ear-splitting

Wine list: Moderately priced, including Spanish and South American selections

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Dinner main courses $14 to $24

Dinner: Sunday 6 P.M. to 11 p.m., Monday to Thursday 6 P.M. to midnight, Friday and Saturday to 1 a.m

* Good

* * Very good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No star: Poor