This Day in Theater History (Henrik Ibsen, Playwright-Provocateur, Dies)

May 23, 1906—Characteristically exclaiming Tvertimod! (On the contrary!”), playwright Henrik Ibsen, who influenced the international theater scene by overturning expectations and confronting audiences with controversial subject matter and greater realism, died in Oslo, Norway, at age 78 following a series of debilitating strokes.

In 25 plays written over nearly a half century, Ibsen moved from historical and/or verse dramas to challenging contemporary tragedies shot through with verisimilitude, psychological insights and symbolism.

Carefully studying the works of Shakespeare in his long initial theatrical apprenticeship, he ultimately was exceeded only by The Bard as the most performed playwright in the world.

 His work influenced such later playwrights as August Strindberg, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and, perhaps most powerfully, George Bernard Shaw, whose essay “The Quintessence of Ibsenism" expounded his importance as a dramatist of ideas.

In his youth Ibsen was a political radical, and in the plays of his maturity he was unafraid to embrace iconoclasm.

In A Doll’s House (1879), he dared to show a housewife willing to leave not just her husband but her children in making a bid for independence.

As if in answer to those who protested that decision, he outraged public opinion even more by presenting in Ghosts (1881) a wife who stayed with her husband and suffered the consequences: a son suffering from syphilis, which she believes he inherited from his philandering father.

When that predictably brought down on him a storm of criticism, he responded with An Enemy of the People (1882), which displayed contempt for representative democracy (“What is the majority? The ignorant mob. Intelligence is always to be found in the minority”).

Paradoxically, this nonconforming playwright grounded much of his work in what would have seemed familiar to audiences of his time: the well-made play featuring plot exposition (often with long-concealed secrets) and clear denouements.

I wonder if those traditional elements may account for why so many performances of his plays stateside go beyond normal translations into English to more freewheeling adaptations meant to recreate the sense of shock experienced by his own Victorian audiences.

In the case of A Doll’s House, for instance, Ingmar Bergman and Amy Herzog, among others, have trimmed the text and even eliminated characters. 

Herzog and Miller, understandably unnerved by the advocacy of eugenics in An Enemy of the People, jettisoned the concept, but in the process downplayed the satire that even took in the play’s hero, Dr. Thomas Stockmann.

Even when playwrights have delivered adaptations with less stilted dialogue that retain the plots, they can be undermined by wayward directors. Ivo van Hove, working with Christopher Hampton’s serviceable 2004 adaptation of Hedda Gabler, undercut it b subjecting his lead, Elizabeth Marvel, to a tomato dousing.

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on ‘These Heroes of Finance’)

“It’s such sport with these heroes of finance; they’re like beads on a string—when one slips off, all the rest follow.” —Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), The League of Youth, translated by William Archer (1869)

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on ‘Castles in the Air’)

“Castles in the air — they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build, too.”—Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), The Master Builder (1892)

Theater Review: ‘Enemy of the People,’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

There are two really good reasons why fans of good theater should make their way to the Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) for its new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. The first is the opportunity to see a rarely performed play by this 19^th-century master of realistic drama in something akin to the spirit in which it was written. The second is the chance to see—for the umpteenth time on a New York stage—an actor whose underemployment on TV and film has made him the darling of Gotham theater aficionados: Boyd Gaines.

An Enemy of the People might be my favorite Ibsen play, but in three decades of theatergoing I had never seen it performed until the preview performance by the MTC a couple of weeks ago.  Directors have taken to other plays by the Scandinavian playwright, seeing in them feminist rallying cries (A Doll’s House), early warnings about religious extremism and untruths about sexually transmitted diseases (Ghosts), dissections of capitalism (John Gabriel Borkman), or even vehicles for exploring bipolar disorders (Hedda Gabbler).

You’d think that Ibsen’s dramedy about a doctor’s environmental crusade would be made to order for today’s theater world. But the content has erected powerful obstacles.

For those who want their protagonists one-dimensionally heroic, Lillian Hellman’s stage manifestos are more congenial than Ibsen’s complex work that satirizes its hero when it is not attacking the townspeople who make him an outcast. And Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s scathing criticism of “the damned, solid, liberal majority”—backed by the playwright’s problematic belief in a superior mind produced by a Darwinian survival of the fittest—might as well be Kryptonite for today's theater professionals.

When people have had the chance to watch the play over the years, there’s a good chance that it was Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation, not Ibsen’s version. No matter what the playwright’s significant strengths, a willingness to take a point of view seriously before knocking it down was not among them. His version of Enemy of the People is a prime case in point, written at the height of McCarthyism, with Thomas Stockmann analogous to blacklist victims of Miller’s time.

The creator of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View From the Bridge will likely continue to be performed till the end of the lifetime of children now growing up, but the adversaries of his heroes are one-dimensional. He simply could not conceive of the strident dissident that annoys the very people he wants to help. His is a theater of straw men, inspired less by the complexity and good humor of Ibsen and Shaw than giving rise to the self-righteous Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing. What Miller’s Enemy gains in ditching in ditching Ibsen’s diatribes against the leveling influence in democratic societies, he loses in presenting an entirely one-sided argument without psychological dimension.

And so, this production, based on a new adaptation by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, was all the more necessary. Sure, there’s the occasional anachronism (“cash cow”). But with help from director Doug Hughes, we finally have an Enemy of the People close to what the playwright intended.

Consider a short but telling exchange. Dr. Stockmann’s hero-worshipping daughter Petra, marveling at her father’s energy, blurts out that he’s been “working like a maniac” lately. Stockmann’s wife quickly hushes her up. It’s a hint that the doctor’s prosperity as staff physician at the municipal baths has been hard-won not simply because of his diligence, but also because his last medical stint in a rural Norwegian village likely ended in his nervous collapse.

This production is exceptionally well served in its lead, Gaines, who invests Dr. Stockmann with the energy of a mad stalk. This actor, perhaps known to TV viewers as Valerie Bertinelli’s husband on One Day at a Time nearly three decades ago, has graced New York theaters since then with one outstanding performance after another, in the likes of Company, Contact, Pygmalion, and 12 Angry Men, winning four Tony Awards in the process.

The complexity of Dr. Stockmann’s position can be seen here in his relationship to his brother Peter, who, as mayor of the town, is also Thomas’ boss. Prior translations of Ibsen emphasized Peter’s pomposity as much as Thomas’ heedlessness. To be sure, as played here by Richard Thomas (The Waltons’ John-Boy Walton, well into middle age), he is caught up in the perks of his position. But he’s also seriously angered that the sibling he helped rescue from penury now stands opposed to what had promised to be the mayor’s greatest achievement: the baths (advocated originally by the doctor himself, then placed, unbeknownst to him, in a mill that pumps its wastes into the pipes) that once promised to boost their coastal town’s economy.

Where Thomas thinks little of expenditures by either himself or the town, Peter is fixated on keeping both in check; where Thomas is utterly impolitic, Peter is the consummate politico, watching his every word and move. They are on a collision course, ending in a climactic battle just before intermission that is acted by Gaines and Thomas in a manner that heightens the overtones of this Cain-and-Abel relationship.

Hughes stages the town meeting where the tensions between the brothers break out publicly in all its raucousness and irony (the only dissenter in the proceedings—all stacked against the doctor—is the town drunk). It’s an event that leaves Dr. Stockmann perilously alone, but for his family, at curtain time—an appropriate, if subdued, ending to a show that convincingly highlights the enduring predicament of a whistle-blower in a democracy whose majority can be all too easily manipulated by leading citizens into self-destructive choices.

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on Liberty)

“One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,’ merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it.”—Playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), in a letter to Georg Brandes, February 17, 1871, as translated in Henrik Ibsen : Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Critical Studies, by Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1899)

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on “Castles in the Air”)

“Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build, too.”—Playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), The Master Builder (1892)

TV Quote of the Day (“Mad Men,” with a Roommate-Ad Critique)

“ ‘Clean, responsible, considerate. I have some nice furniture and a small television’? It reads like the stage directions for an Ibsen play.”—Joan (Christina Hendricks), mocking Peggy’s (Elizabeth Moss) want ad for a roommate, on Mad Men, quoted in “Soundbites,” Entertainment Weekly, Fall TV Preview 2009

Quote of the Day (Henrik Ibsen, on Financial Titans)

“It's such sport with these heroes of finance: they are like beads on a string—when one slips off, all the rest follow.”—Henrik Ibsen, The League of Youth (1869)

Theater Review: Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” from the Roundabout Theatre Co.

The word I associate with the Roundabout Theatre’s production of Hedda Gabler is “massacre.” The critics would have it that this gruesome act was perpetrated upon Ibsen’s 1891 drama by director Ian Rickson in collaboration with adaptors Christopher Shinn and Anne-Charlotte Hay. Such thunderous invective was hurled at the play that the Roundabout probably couldn’t bring down the final curtain fast enough two weekends ago.

I’m not sure what was eating these reviewers, for they reacted out of all proportion to what I saw onstage. Am I arguing that this production will forever alter how the Scandinavian playwright’s anti-heroine is viewed? Hardly.

But the media did a major disservice by discouraging theatergoers from a revival that was consistently challenging. Critics have expended countless ink praising shows far less competent than this one—and if they rifled through their clips and had some residual grace to go with their more-than-abundant venom, they’d own up to it.

(I’ve seen far worse shows mounted at the Roundabout alone (Paula Vogel’s shrill Red State satire The Mineola Twins, along with A Streetcar Named Desire, with John C. Reilly horrifyingly miscast as Stanley Kowalski and Natasha Richardson—undoubtedly as dear a lady as the obits have made her out to be—just not up, for whatever reason, to the demanding role of Blanche).

Yet whatever criticism accrued to either production paled compared with what happened here. You’d think that poor Mary-Louise Parker had murdered a batch of students rather than her fiercely conflicted modern anti-hero. (In fact, an Off-Broadway revival a few years ago starring Elizabeth Marvel featured acts a thousand times more bizarre than anything here (e.g., a tomato-juice dowsing) – and many critics found no real problem with the proceedings!)

Even the beginning of the play made critics take umbrage, as the audience became aware that Ms. Parker’s Hedda was lying face down in a disheveled red gown, baring her derriere. The fuss was beyond me, given that the past two decades have seen a number of actors and actresses exposing far more of their skin (including full-frontal nudity) than did Ms. Parker—and with far less motivation or realism.

Sexuality and its limits, after all, are at the heart of this drama. It’s not only that Hedda’s beauty is mentioned by more than one character, but that she uses her sexuality as a test. She wants to manage the destiny of others (such as a former lover) but thrashes about wildly at the thought that sex could leave her under the control of anyone else. Remarks that she is “glowing” and that she appears to have put on weight are enough to anger her—a clear indication that she fears pregnancy will bind her further in marriage.

At least Parker came up with some interesting, though not strange, stage business for her intelligent but emotionally constricted character, including playing the piano—hinting at the creative impulses she thinks has been buried in marriage to Jurgen, an academic whose thesis is the drably titled Domestic Crafts of Holland and Belgium in the Middle Ages.

No, I’m afraid that if the show’s depiction of Hedda seemed murky to many reviewers (and, let’s be fair, not a few theatergoers who complained online), the fault lies less with director and actress than with the playwright.

Hedda Gabler is the female counterpart to Hamlet: a character who continually resists being reshaped by others, a figure of great potential but equally great complexity and torment, someone who makes the course of the play deviate wildly away from conventional melodrama with her absolute unpredictability.

Too intelligent and talented for her husband or the proper Victorian society he represents, she turns to mischief. The name of the play itself is itself a tipoff of her dilemma, for Hedda remains the headstrong daughter of a general rather than the dutiful wife of an academic.

I’ve seen Parker in innumerable movie and TV appearances, but never onstage. This performance hasn’t discouraged me in the slightest. Her interpretation of her iconic role—restless, angry—sometimes entirely within the spirit of Ibsen’s text.

With her dark brown eyes and pale white screen luminous in the darkness of the American Airlines Theatre, she vividly embodied a woman who could only find fulfillment in destruction. “I am burning a child,” she says desperately as she tosses the work of a lifetime into the fire.

The other cast members have the thankless task for injecting complexity into characters that Ibsen created as mere foils for his ineffectual female rebel. Michael Cerveris made for a Sweeney Todd you couldn’t take your eyes off of a few years ago, but here, by necessity, he practically fades into the woodwork as Hedda’s clueless husband. (You can imagine her frustration with him—kind of like punching endlessly into a pile of feathers.) Peter Stormare invests Judge Brack with the kind of arrogance that makes you believe him when he says he wants to be “cock of the walk.”

In a post-show discussion with dramaturg Ted Sod, Patricia Denison of Barnard College illuminated the challenges of staging a play that is primarily character-driven as opposed to being a women’s rights manifesto—and, thus, infinitely challenging now as it was more than a century ago.

A few nights ago, one of my friends came up with a measured assessment of the play that did it far more justice than any of the critics did. She thought it was well-done, but not something that people had to rush out to see. That pretty much sums up my feelings, too.