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Course Description

Summary

“All around is stone/And all is soft inside.” –Aurora Aksnes Described as the second most frequently produced playwright in the world after William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen continues to provoke, challenge and inspire contemporary audiences with the contradictions in his work. This course explores Ibsen’s immense influence and innovations as an architect of modern drama. The Norwegian playwright restlessly experimented with the theatrical genre while relentlessly pursuing themes of personal freedom. From early works such as Brand to his final play When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen’s plays urge the individual’s imperative toward moral autonomy and the challenging of repressive societal institutions: whether marriage, the church, or the corruption of a free press. As Ivo de Figueiredo observes, “Ibsen captured his own times with astonishing power,” even as his works, written between 1850 and 1899, have inspired a diverse array of twentieth and twenty-first century playwrights and adaptors, ranging from Owen Dodson and Charles Ludlam, to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Amy Herzog, and Charles Busch. Setting Ibsen’s plays in contexts of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, the dawn of continental Realist and Naturalist movements, and the rise of the “New Woman,” this course will span Ibsen’s epic verse dramas (e.g. Peer Gynt); his social and feminist problem plays (e.g. A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People); and his theatrical explorations into subconscious drives (e.g. The Master Builder) in late works that influenced new movements of Symbolism and Expressionism, and paralleled the dream-plays of August Strindberg, Ibsen’s peer and rival in Sweden.