The New Vic/BAM Harvey Theater; Brooklyn; February 21 – March 16, 2014

This New Vic production, which got raves in the West End, at the Duke of York’s, in 2012, was greeted in New York in 2014 with equal enthusiasm.

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JDX—A Public Enemy
Public Theatre; New York City; January 8 – 16, 2014

As a part of the 2014 “Under the Radar” Festival, devoted to the presentation of experimental work from the United States and abroad, this year the Antwerp company tg STAN presented JDX, their version of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. For audience members already familiar with the general approach of this well-known European group, the production offered few surprises.

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The Master Builder; Brooklyn Academy of Music; May 12—June 9, 2013

 Director Andrei Belgrader’s Master Builder, with the well-known American stage and screen actor John Turturro as Solness, is one of the most unfortunate Ibsen productions I have seen in the last ten years. It presents a script that makes nonsense of Ibsen’s text; a Hilda whose cartoon mouse delivery made spectators put their hands over their ears; and a Turturro struggling (and failing) not to make Solness resemble an over-the-top Tony Soprano.

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An Enemy of the People; The Schaubühne/Brooklyn Academy of Music; November 6-10, 2013

 Thomas Ostermeier is one of the few German (or continental) stage directors whose productions are invited to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the November production of his recent An Enemy of the People is his third there, all Ibsen plays, preceded by Hedda Gabler in 2006 and Nora (A Doll House), in 2004. By contemporary German standards there is nothing particularly shocking about the many adjustments, some powerful, some indifferent, some foolish, that Ostermeier has made in each of these adaptations, but within the context of American production, especially of Ibsen, they seem radical if not revolutionary.

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Aquila Theatre/Skirball Center; New York University; March 30, 2010

Founded in 1991 in the UK by Peter Meineck, the Aquila Theatre calls itself “dedicated to the reinterpretation of classical [sic] drama.” It is based at New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies and presents several plays annually at NYU and at other academic venues in the city. Its main activity, however, is touring; it visits about 70 U.S. towns and cities a year.

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Adapted by Seth Barrish and K. Lorrel Manning
The Barrow Group; New York City; February 6 – March 8, 2010

Shaw once famously pontificated on the transitory nature of the problems in Ibsen’s social dramas, claiming that “A Doll’s House will be flat as dishwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be fresh as paint.” This observation has not proven among Shaw’s more accurate prognostications. Today, more than a century later, we still find Ibsen’s social dramas as disturbingly relevant to current social and political concerns as the morning headlines. This has often struck me in attending revivals of these plays, but perhaps never more powerfully than in the new adaptation of Enemy by the Barrow Group.

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The Pearl Theatre; New York City; November 12 – December 19, 2010

One of the most remarkable things about the dramas of Ibsen’s middle period is the way that, to a much greater extent than any other Western dramatist with a strong interest in social questions, the plays continue to resonate powerfully more than a century after their creation. I was struck last season, during our ongoing political and economic crisis, at how immediately relevant were Dr. Stockmann’s misgivings about the majority and their easy manipulation by the media and by demagogic politicians.

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The Resonance Ensemble/Harold Clurman Theatre; New York City; May 9 – June 5, 2010

The Resonance Ensemble, founded in 2001, offers an unusual and stimulating repertory season each year, consisting of a classic play in repertory with a new play inspired by it, as for example the 2007 repertory of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard paired with Arthur Giron’s The Coffee Trees, a variation on Chekhov’s themes set in contemporary Guatemala. The 2010 repertory departs somewhat from this practice by pairing The Master Builder with a play not inspired by it, but with a similar theme, June Finfer’s The Glass House, a portrayal of the real-life architect Mies van der Rohe late in his career as he struggles to maintain his position and power.

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A Jewish Theater Company ; New York; March 16, 20 and 23, 2011 (11, 15 Shushan Purim and 18 of Adar II, 5771)

In 2010, Yoni Oppenheim, Jesse Freedman, and Avi Soroka created A Jewish Theater Company, the first professional Jewish theatre company in New York dedicated to Shabbat-observing artists. This explains the unconventional performance times of their production of A Doll House, on two Wednesdays and a Sunday, avoiding the Shabbat, which prohibits deliberate physical activity, including, of course, theatrical performing, on Fridays and Saturdays.

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Ghosts; Classic Play Reading Series at Merchant’s House “Secret Garden”; July 7-10 and 14, 17, 2011
The Wild Duck; Compassion Theater Company/Shetler Studios; July 13-24, 2011

Summer theatre in New York, as in many other theatre capitals, is distinctly less varied and ambitious than winter fare, and serious classic drama, except of course for Shakespeare, who is one of the mainstays of American summer theatre, is rarely seen. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see revivals of two major Ibsen dramas being offered Off-Off Broadway in mid-July. The first was distinctly a summer offering, Ghosts presented in the “secret garden” of the Merchant’s House Museum in Greenwich Village.

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