Program Notes

• A Note from The artistic director
• A Towering Playwright: HENRIK IBSEN
• Dizzying New Heights
• MASTER BUILDERS AND MISTRESS-MUSES
• HENRIK IBSEN TIMELINE

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A Towering Playwright: HENRIK IBSEN

 

Henrik Ibsen’s plays struck nineteenth-century Europe like bolts of theatrical lightning. Born in 1828, the Norwegian writer revolutionized drama, scorching outmoded morés to coax newer truths from their ashes.

His works reflected, with both candor and nuance, a society fractured in its views on religion, class, and women’s rights. Above all, the playwright championed personal freedom: each individual’s duty to defy convention and “sail under his own flag.”

Ibsen’s dramatic development coincided with the heyday of two earlier dramatic forms. “Romantic melodrama” stormed with bombastic soliloquies, while suspenseful unraveling of secrets drove the “well-made play.” Absorbing some aspects of both genres, Ibsen also radically transformed them—pruning his plays of their artificialities and greatly enriching their emotional scope.

The playwright’s first works, based on Norse sagas and ballads, mostly failed with the public, but the dramatist soared to national prestige with his verse epics, Brand and Peer Gynt (1867). The playwright, whom the critic Georg Brandes dubbed the “hammer and benefactor of the North,” next abandoned poetic form for the social realism of prose. Affirming his new commitment to raising social questions, Ibsen shocked and galvanized Europe with plays such as Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. His most famous play, A Doll’s House (1879), ends with housewife Nora leaving her family on a mission of self-discovery: her door-slam was heard around the world.

With The Master Builder (1892), Ibsen crowned a cycle of plays delving the hidden depths of the subconscious. In this play, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, and others, Ibsen showed how, like The Master Builder’s visionary architect Halvard Solness, we all too “fight against the dark forces within ourselves.” Ibsen died in 1906, leaving behind over two dozen plays. Like Solness’s church over the town of Lysanger, his shadow towers majestically over Western drama.

—MAYA CANTU, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG