Word: ibsenism
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...Woman" has been proclaimed with a certain regularity for a century and more. Ibsen brought Nora Helmer out of her doll's house in 1879. and succeeding generations have invented her anew: in Shaw's drawing-room heroines, Laurentian sensualists, Brett Ashleys, flappers, women who smoked and drank and swore and brushed their teeth with last night's Scotch, got divorced or did not bother to get married at all, wore pants, and perhaps in the mellow suburban '50s, lived to grow old as Auntie Mame...
Nearly a century has gone by since Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Nora's challenge has not been met in the theater. Ibsen himself could have written a sequel that began with Nora slamming the door and journeying forth to mold her destiny. Ibsen never wrote that play, and no modern playwright has made a serious attempt at it. Instead, women have been perceived as types-almost anything but the full human being Nora craved to become. Women characters fare no better at the hands of female playwrights, and even authors who respect women have...
...alternate weeks, the course replaces conventional classes with professional performances of excerpts from such plays as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Before each 15-to 20-minute performance, the students are briefed by an English professor on the theme of the play and by a psychiatrist on psychological traits to be observed in the characters. Afterward students, faculty and the actors themselves take part in a two-hour discussion...
...Norwegian Family Council, a state-financed organization that lobbies for legislation aimed at improving family life. After working out plans with the help of University of Oslo Sociologist Erik Gronseth, the council recruited couples willing to participate in the role-swapping experiment. Among those who volunteered was Anne Ibsen Bulko, 30, a descendant of Playwright Henrik Ibsen, one of the pioneers in Women's Liberation...
Buried Tension. For this reason, theater delighted him. Not the heroics of Shakespeare or Racine, but the work of the new playwrights of the '90s like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, for which Vuillard designed sets at the Théatre de l'Oeuvre in Paris. Russell notes that Vuillard's interiors tend to possess "precisely the elements which Maeterlinck called for: the silence, the half-light, the tensions buried below the point of visibility." He could paint the pauses and solicitous hesitations in polite conversation as neatly as Oscar Wilde could write them...