Word: ibsenism
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CHOOSING TO PRESENT a play as good as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler--as the Quincy House Drama Society must have realized--considerably lightens the director's workload. Still, it doesn't make it disappear. The lackluster production in the Quincy House JCR this weekend shows the effects of this gap in reasoning. Uninspired line-reading and pacing, added to a lack of attention to both the grand shape of the plot and the details of the illusion, can't entirely quench the snap and sparkle of Ibsen's dialogue or the power of the story he tells, but they...
...find artistic fulfillment by manipulating the men around her. In the few days that follow her return with Tesman from their honeymoon, Hedda gradually becomes twisted in her own plots, trapped by the circumstances that once made her powerful. The sickening build from complication to outright tragedy is quintessential Ibsen...
...sense, Part I forecloses an epoch. Ibsen encompasses the dying out of old legends and old gods, the anachronism of the early 19th century Byronic romantic hero and the ushering in of urban industrial society with its hard-nosed pragmatism...
Presciently modern, Ibsen foresaw that collectivized man would make egocentric quests for identity and searches for self. Peer's quest for self-definition becomes a tale of tepid damnation. The suave, cynical Peer of Part II (played with acute perceptivity by Gerry Bamman) defines himself by what he does and not by what he is. And what he does is always tainted by easy accommodation and the habit of incessant compromise. He moves from trading slaves out of Charleston, S.C., and shipping pagan idols to China to reigning as a prophet in the Moroccan desert, finally ending up crowned...
...audacity of this Guthrie offering brings honor to the U.S. theater. It also reminds us of what an intrepid culture hero Henrik Ibsen was. He strove mightily against the confines of a narrow provincial society to free the spirit and light up the mind. All of his plays are the sounds of chains snapping...