Word: ibsens
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...meeting last night, it was definitely announced that Webster's White Devil and Ibsen's Romersholm will take the October and December Loeb slots, respectively. Ronder had received permission to fill the November slot last spring, but he did not at that time announce the play he would...
...comedy is buoyantly performed, a happy tour de farce. Donald Moffat, in the role of John Tarleton, the self-taught underwear tycoon, is the image of Shaw's young old man, the drawing-room atheist who quotes his chosen gospels: "Read Ibsen. Read Dickens. Read Whatshisname." As his daughter Hypatia, Frances Sternhagen seems to have been born with a riding crop in hand and the conviction that the pursuit of a mate is the most exciting form of fox hunt. James Greene is cringingly comic as a socialist underdog who yearns to bite the hand that feeds...
Ghosts, written 80 years ago by Henrik Ibsen, is what might have happened to Nora if she had never left A Doll's House...
Ghosts is haunted by a successful past. The plight of the playwright as social reformer is to turn one generation's problem into the next generation's platitude. When Ibsen took syphilis as a topic in 1881, the subject was novel, courageous and scandalous. In the era of antibiotics, it will scarcely lift an eyebrow, let alone carry a play. Other Ibsen shockers also qualify as placid truisms today: that a pastor can be a sanctimonious fraud; that mothers sometimes love their sons not wisely but too well; that in Paris, artists and models sometimes live together unwed...
This credit balance of Ibsen's is some what dissipated by David Ross's Manhattan production. In the first play of Ross's current Ibsen cycle, Anne Meacham made a formidable Hedda Gabler; Leueen MacGrath is a lightweight Mrs. Alving. Ibsen's Mrs. Alving is scoured to self-knowledge by the harsh uses of life; Actress MacGrath's Mrs. Alving is so much the sophisticated skeptic that events merely seem to confirm her suspicions. Modernity also mars Staats Cotsworth's Pastor Manders. He plays the hypocrite, but he is not, as Ibsen intended...