“The character of Nora has fascinated me for a long time but I felt that the play, in the form I knew, was too dated. I would not have been interested in accepting the part in the Archer version, because the lines were too stiffly artificial and lacked conviction. The Thornton Wilder adaptation, however, has restored life and credibility to a drama, which is still one of the finest efforts in our theatrical literature.” –Ruth Gordon, Cincinnati Times-Star, October 27, 1937
“It’s a thrill to encounter this collaboration between these two pioneers of modern theater. Wilder has created a brilliant version of Ibsen’s great play, which is taut, conversational and pulsing with life nearly eighty years after it was written. Of course, Wilder worked on A Doll’s House while writing Our Town. There are incredible echoes between Nora and Emily—two young women who poignantly confront their own mortality and must say good-bye to life as they know it.” –Arin Arbus, director, A Doll’s House, Theatre for a New Audience, May 1, 2016
Not staged until 2016, since its record-breaking Broadway premiere starring Ruth Gordon in 1937, this is the first publication of the adaptation of Ibsen’s classic drama as revitalized through the shrewd lens of American drama master Thornton Wilder. With clarifying dialogue, Wilder uproots this classic from Norway and funnels it through an American lens. The marriage of Ibsen’s naturalistic style melds with Wilder’s knack for emotional nuance to create a demonstrative edition of the revered A Doll’s House.
Henrik Ibsen is often referred to as the father of modern realism. He is most well known for his plays Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Master Builder, The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt, and An Enemy of the People.
Thornton Wilder is considered to be one of the most accomplished American playwrights and novelists of the twentieth century. He received three Pulitzer Prize Awards for Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928). His novel The Eighth Day received The National Book Award in 1968. Our Town is the most-produced American play in the world.
Author Biography:
Born in Norway in 1828, Henrik Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic ‘problem’ plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes.
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Yale and Princeton, was an accomplished American novelist and playwright whose works explore the connection between the commonplace and the cosmic dimensions of human experience. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and his next-to-last novel, The Eighth Day received the National Book Award (1968). Two of his four major plays won Pulitzer Prizes, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). His play, The Matchmaker ran on Broadway for 486 performances (1955-1957) and was later adapted into the record-breaking musical Hello, Dolly!
Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.
