Word: ibsenism
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Tolstoy said that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Theatrically, unhappy families do have something in common: they are the breeding grounds of durably vital plays and of great playwrights. From the Greek tragedies through Ibsen and Chekhov, the unhappy family recurs as a dominating theme. Similarly, it is almost a catalogue of the best American plays. Think of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Edward Albee...
Angles of Vision. In A Doll's House, Ibsen showed the transition of a woman from a pampered doll to an independent being. In Hedda Gabler, he examines a woman who has totally left the doll's house in spirit, but who still occupies it out of social convention, a woman trying to "keep house" with desperate calm while undergoing an inner earthquake. One reason that the present production seems so fresh is that Hedda's plight is seen from Hedda's angle of vision. The ultraneurotic Hedda has always been seen from...
...Ibsen foresaw that the emancipation of women actually meant the masculinization of women. In a real but relatively limited sense, that meant acquiring a man's education and doing a man's job. The trickier task was to appropriate the realms of a man's mind and will, areas that men have guarded with far more fear and hostility than they have ever displayed about their clubs, offices and colleges...
...course. I'd like to use many of the same actors in my next production, which is to be Ibsen's Peer Gyat. What we have developed will be quite useful, since the conception involves every actor in the company playing different aspects of Peer. while at the same time once more denying the usual trappings of the play...
...What talk it seemed to be! Shaw, Ibsen, Nietzsche. Back and forth the conversation went, in the clever, fragmented sentences of quick repartee. Before dessert they had gone on to Katherine Mansfield, and then in a postprandial few minutes they dealt, to their satisfaction and mine, with Cabell and Menken...