Henrik Ibsen

It was Tuesday, May 30, 1922, the day of the dedication of the solemn and splendid memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, and the ceremony on the Mall featured speeches by President Warren Harding and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The most...

In these early weeks of summer, a number of local theater companies are staging updated classics. Next week, the Goodman begins performances of Rebecca Gilman's "Dollhouse," a modernized version of the 19th Century Henrik Ibsen play. Currently at...

SHAKING my shoulders to dislodge the ice cube that was slithering down my back, I stepped forward to claim the certificate verifying that I had crossed the Arctic Circle into the land of the midnight sun. This was a rite of passage on Day 5 of a six-...

"I'm always leery of stunt casting," says Mark Povinelli, the 4-foot-tall actor who stars in "Mabou Mines Dollhouse," a post-modern twist on Henrik Ibsen's 1879 proto-feminist classic. Questions about casting are likely to be part of any conversation...

In relocating a 19th Century Norwegian icon to modern-day Lincoln Park, land of the custom-quarried granite kitchen countertop, the Goodman Theatre's "Dollhouse" dances on the edge of parody, like Jennifer Beals in "Flashdance." Yet even with a limited...

It is, of all our cities, the most American and the least typical. It stubbles the wide open spaces of the West, its signature landmark an off-limits temple. (Rising, rumors have it, above underground tunnels). Settled by pioneers, seat of apostles....

"Golf," a drama by poet Susan Hahn that debuts Wednesday at Circle Theatre, depicts much more than its title sport. Wandering all over the map, this image-haunted world premiere exposes the "games of life" and the rules of those games as they apply to...

Too often playmaking, like politics, settles for the art of the possible. Yet it's the art of the impossible that got a lot of us jazzed about the theater in the first place, and it's important to remember that first place, living as we do in a world...

"The Inheritance" is a powerhouse. Highly dramatic and intensely emotional, blessed with strong themes and an unstoppable narrative drive, it is adult, intelligent entertainment of a kind we rarely see these days. No, it doesn't come from Hollywood,...

Besides claiming the most impressive sideburns in world drama — late-period Elvis would weep in envy — the Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen left behind a body of plays, in verse and in craggy, formidable prose, containing not one but two instances of major...

"Everything I think is mocked by everything I do!" cries Sergius, the braggart soldier brought low in George Bernard Shaw's delicious "Arms and the Man." Is there a finer expression of hypocrisy in the English language? Sergius believes himself a paragon...