Word: ibsenism
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...Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. The plot, a study in conflict and alienation, revolves around a brilliant and selfish woman caught between fierce inner pride and contempt for those nearest her, between past choice and present entrapment, between a stifling marriage and fascination with an old admirer now involved with another woman...
Though Hedda always occupies the play's center, Ibsen's profound insight and tight structure integrate the other characters as complex personalities in their own right. There is Hedda's bumbling, self-important husband George Tesman; his well-meaning spinster aunt; the gifted and unbalanced Eilert Lovborg; the parasitically devoted Thea Elvsted Hedda's rival as Lovborg's muse; and the suave dissolute Judge Brack, whose cynical attempt to blackmail Hedda precipitates her defiant suicide...
...professional productions of the show, which continues to run off-Broadway, you will not be disappointed with the faithful Kirkland version. But if your expectations for theater are higher than what Jones and Schmidt set out to do, you would be wise to spend the evening with friends, reading Ibsen aloud...
...blend well into the dialogue of a novel. And if the references to Hedda Gabler are supposed to fill vacuums in Elesine's character with delicate but complex psychological motives, Auchincloss is either flattering himself or insulting the reader. As Auchincloss he is really quite admirable. As Ibsen or as Racine, he is, however, disappointing...
...there was little commercial theater in China, but young performers like Chiang Ch'ing vied to appear at coolie wages in dozens of small, semiprofessional theaters-an off-off Nanking Road. Most of the plays were dreary ideological tracts, melodramas or translations of Western plays, like those of Ibsen or Shaw, that were deemed by one of the dozens of left-wing sects to have a social message. One of Chiang Ch'ing's favorite roles in Shanghai was in A Doll's House. She played Nora as a modern female rebel, a fact she proudly...