Word: ibsens
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...their own as a free-standing one-family house (independence, shelter, family, the Little House on the Prairie still, even when the prairie has turned into Iowa City). One author, Jane Davison, called one-family suburban houses "an oppressive Utopian ideal, a spiritual imperative"the Levittown version of Ibsen's dollhouse. But economics and demographics, as well as feminist restlessness, intrude on the vision The size of the average American household has shrunk in 20 years from 3.3 to 2.75, a fragmentation that demands more housing units even at a moment when housing is harder than ever to finance...
When he spots one, his shout is not "Yoicks," but "Read Kipling"-"Read Dickens"-"Read Ibsen"-"Read Mrs. Browning." Of course, being Shavians, Tarleton and the eight other whiz-tongued characters in the play have no time to read. Wittily, polemically, almost lyrically, they talk talk talk talk talk. This exuberant cascade engulfs such subjects as parents and children, the guerrilla war between the sexes, love and marriage, feminism, socialism and capitalism, the new technology (circa 1909) and how to tell a gentleman from...
Sure, the playwright was penning propaganda to some extent (as we find in plenty of great drama from the 15th-century Everyman through much of Ibsen to most of Brecht). But he was also doing a good deal more, for Shakespeare is rarely as simple as he is often made out to be. There are ironic subtexts in the play; and the dramatist includes inglorious aspects of war as well as unbecoming traits in Henry's character. The Bard gave us something far more complex than a cardboard king of diamonds, as more and more people are coming to realize...
...with him, and Sally wants Matt to leave alone. But as Wilson's smoothly polished conversational writing advances, with plenty of one-liners and an occasional sight gag. Talley's Folly turns from a straightforward romantic sit-com into a much more sensitive character evocation. Like a stripped-down Ibsen drama, it forces its two characters to excavate the most airless tunnels of their memories...
James Dolbear also fails as Nora's tyrannical husband Thomas, unnecessarily Americanized from Ibsen's Torvald. His mugging and blustering gives the character a sort of musical comedy quality; a cute shallowness. His tone never changes. He's not believable for a second as an ambitious, willful man, tortured by the demands of respectability--he's just a sissy, a bone-headed dolt...