Word: ibsenism
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...native South Africa, coupled with a lyric ability to lift those observations to the level of metaphor. It is not enough for an artist to be right-minded on even the most potent political issues of his day. To earn a lasting place in literature, to rank with Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht, he must also demonstrate subtlety of craft, power of language and insight into character -- and probably must reach beyond his immediate context into other realms of the real world or imagination. Significantly, after the autobiographical catharsis of 'Master Harold' . . . and the Boys (1982), which reflected his formative...
Arthur Miller is the American Ibsen, a gifted domestic dramatist who instead prefers political crusading, onstage and off. He and his characters have seemed to inhabit a world of clear-cut right and wrong. This personal history gives poignant impact to Miller's new one-acts, collectively titled Danger: Memory!, at New York City's Lincoln Center. One is a kitchen slice of life between elderly friends, the other a charged and almost surreal interview between a hostile police detective and the father of a murder victim. What links them is a parallel revelation: in each, a man about Miller...
...publishing house and a lady; and Paul Treat, a steam-headed avant-garde stage director who is definitely no gentleman. Treat is known for his manhandling of the classics -- Peer Gynt performed on stilts, As You Like It featuring seals. Before long he has Frances believing that stilts rescue Ibsen and that seals are ideal companions for Shakespeare's lovers. He also has her playing dubious "primal scenes" -- one is called "Rudolf and Mary," about the suicide pact at Mayerling -- repeated interminably until they become ordeals...
...author. Every production needs a point of view, to be sure; no play mounts itself. Yet exciting interpretations almost always result not from invention but from rediscovering something the playwright meant to say. That kind of respectful reading underlies Rumanian Expatriate Lucian Pintilie's eclectic, visually daring version of Ibsen's The Wild Duck at Arena Stage in Washington. The play is frequently seen as a domestic melodrama in which well-intentioned people cause calamities; the climactic suicide of a dreamy adolescent girl is generally staged with perverse beauty, as a sentimental symbol of how adult reality crushes freedom...
...reorders their lives with disastrous consequences--mingles religious fanaticism with a rich man's easy disdain for money. Fittingly, the production ends without the comfort of catharsis, in a fistfight between the unrepentant Gregers and a neighbor, a drunken but discerning doctor. The incidents come basically from Ibsen, conveyed with a rawness modern audiences rarely see in his work. Even in this highly symbolic play, he makes a harrowing social realist...