Word: ibsens
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...Henrik Ibsen...
When he wrote Peer Gyntin 1867, Ibsen did not dream that his epic poem would ever be performed onstage. Uncut, it contains five acts and 38 scenes. Its panoramic sweep embraces four continents: Europe, Africa, North America and Asia. The action unfolds on mountain crests and sun-bleached deserts, within limpid fjords and amid howling sea storms. These requirements have proved daunting to most productions, except that in recent decades stage technology has become much more sophisticated. So has the audience, schooled by the movies' crosscutting and swift evolution of scenes...
...excellent company of actors at work, but sometimes it's even more so to see them at play. In The Boys From Syracuse, the entire ART seems to be on a holiday, with nary an over-the-shoulder glance at the stern repertory countenances of Chekhov and Ibsen, and only a very cursory one at Shakespeare's. The Comedy of Errors, upon which The Boys is loosely based, never was one of the Bard's greatest creations anyway-he hadn't traded in his slapstick for lofty rhetoric and sublime poetry yet. Besides, he cribbed the plot from Plautus...
...playwright but as a thinker and philosopher, an anchor in early twentieth-century thought. Through detailed analysis of O'Neill's most important plays, rather than elaborate biography, Berlin skillfully presents the themes and doctrines of O'Neill's works and those he shares with Freud, Marx, Ibsen and other contemporaries...
Short sketches of O'Neill's era set the stage for O'Neill's entrance into the theater world. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Synge were dead. In America, travelling companies that repeated Shakespeare or other European imports were very popular. Yet, says Berlin, these were only "escapist, money-making entertainment," yet to be considered art. Making that leap to original art was the accomplishment of O'Neill and his amateur theater group, the Provincetown Players. Also credited with bringing vemacular to the American stage, he set many of his plays in backgrounds that demanded specific U.S. regional dialects. His ease...