Word: ibsenism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...famed plays were revived in Manhattan on successive nights last week, soon flickered out. Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (produced by Robert Henderson & Estelle Winwood) lasted four performances, Ibsen's The Wild Duck (produced by Henry Forbes) lasted three. With the shining exception of the Mercury Theatre's Julius Caesar (TIME, Nov. 22), Shakespeare has had hard sledding on Broadway this season. As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of Windsor were flops, Coriolanus a middling success in its briefly scheduled Federal Theatre run. The Merry Wives, which was written to order...
...Wild Duck, coming after the season's brilliant revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House (TIME, Jan. 10), was just as disastrous as The Merry Wives in exactly the opposite way. Underplayed to the vanishing point, it left the audience wondering whether they had lost their hearing or the actors had lost their voices. With the pace a solemn largo, The Wild Duck, possibly the greatest play in the modern theatre, might have got by as a genteel pantomime had there been any gestures...
...Roosevelt Administration (TIME, March 14). So last week the three TVA directors appeared in Washington for their long threatened showdown before Representatives, Senators, Capital correspondents and the President of the U. S. By week's end the TVA family row, like the Great Boyg which oppressed Ibsen's hero Peer Gynt, was beginning to seem a tantalizing something at once too big to ignore and too shapeless to grasp...
...Doll's House (by Henrik Ibsen, new acting version by Thornton Wilder; produced by Jed Harris). Of late years Ibsen's famed Doll's House has been gathering dust in the theatre's attic. But shrewd Producer Jed Harris thought that all the old play needed was a thorough dusting. As house cleaner he got Author Thornton Wilder, whose used his broom with a will, beat all the grimy old-fashionedness out of the dialogue, threw 15 unnecessary minutes right out the window. Producer Harris opened his refurbished Doll's House at last summer...
...star was Comedienne Ruth Gordon, who made a great success last season in Wycherley's scandalous Country Wife. She plays Nora in .4 Doll's House as a childlike, skipping chucklehead, a unique individual rather than the social type Ibsen meant her to symbolize, thus helps transform the play from an outmoded indictment into a moving character study. As Nora's complacent spouse, Dennis King, hero of operettas, farces and romantic dramas, plays Ibsen as well as he sings Lehar and Friml. For all of Torvald's prissy traits, Actor King makes him pitiable...