Word: ibsenism
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Those who fear the rule of King Mob often complain of "the tyranny of the majority" and even romantically assert, as did one of Ibsen's characters in An Enemy of the People, that "the minority is always in the right." Lone voices crying in the wilderness often do speak good sense, and majorities can of course be wrong, or infuriatingly slow to come round to a view that is later seen to be right. But after examining all the arguments for the assumed tyranny of the majority, Ferdinand A. Hermens, professor emeritus of the University of Cologne, concluded...
Died. Blanche Yurka, 86, accomplished dramatic actress; of arteriosclerosis; in Manhattan. Yurka was acclaimed for decades for her stage portrayals of such classic figures as Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Shakespeare's Gertrude, which she played to John Barrymore's Hamlet. She also appeared in several films, most memorably as Madame De-Farge in A Tale of Two Cities...
...parallels to cloud over the deficiency of the early plays. But Brecht's brand of Marxism was a disciplining and an organizing principle, as well as an ideology. Social commitment and epic dramatic technique reinforced each other, in his greatest works, and neither is present in his early plays. Ibsen's first ten plays have been largely forgotten by everyone but scholars; it would be equally appropriate if Brecht's early plays--with the exception of Drums in the Night, which he rewrote in 1928 and 1954--were left to the scholars as well...
When I asked McCleery if the suspicious resemblance between the relationships in his play and in A Doll's House were merely coincidental, he acknowledged that Nora and Torvald Handover were pretty strong influences on him as he created the Hardesty pair. He drew a lot from Ibsen: marital strife stemming from an imbalanced relationship, the husband's view of the wife as a subservient partner, and the wife's surreptitious assistance to the husband and his career success. But Hardesty Park lacks the pessimistic and jaded timbre of Ibsen's drama...
Lots, as it turned out. Almost perversely, O'Neill forced his life to come out as tragically as his scripts by specializing in family disasters. O'Neill families resembled his literary influences: plots by Ibsen, wives by Strindberg. In his 40th year he left Agnes Boulton (mother of Shane and Oona O'Neill), a short-story writer who once fell asleep while he was reading a script to her. His third and last wife never made that mistake. Born Hazel Tharsing, Carlotta Monterey met her fourth husband when she played in The Hairy Ape. Once her eyes...