Ibsen's "Master Builder' at People's Light (2nd review)

Ibsen's middle works explore a theme that's still relevant today: the balance between individual self-determination and the duty to one's family and the social order. His Master Builder (1892) concerns a ruthless architect whose personal ambition and vanity consume the energies and lives of those around him.

Halvard Solness violates his boundaries at every turn. He knows he owes a duty of fidelity to his wife; he owes his draftsman Ragnar a chance to get started in life by providing him with a recommendation; and he owes his mistress Kaja the opportunity to start a family by finally relieving her of the myth that— after five years— he will abandon his wife for her. But by continuing to "imagine his desires in his mind" and see them fulfilled, he only exalts his own goals above social mores designed to reign in such egocentric behavior.

Ibsen's vision is poorly served in the current People's Light and Theatre production. Ken Marini's clumsy, unfocused direction thwarts the potential realism and renders the entire play into a cartoonish mess.

Marini committed the first of his errors by miscasting Stephen Novelli as Solness and Kim Carson as Hilda, his young admirer. The Master Builder demands a kind of Jack Kennedy-style charisma from any actor cast as Solness. As Lloyd Bentsen might have quipped to Novelli, your Solness is no Jack Kennedy. Novelli's attempt at megalomania comes off as mere narcissism, and a wavering one at that.

Carson as Hilda similarly flounders. In the case of both characters, Marini failed to present a coherent vision or render Ibsen's message with any modern relevance.

The rising middle class

To my mind, Ibsen's true revolutionary idea expressed itself not only in how he wholesale applied realism to staging, but in how this approach made viable the problem of self-realization in the nascent middle classes of his society. Before Ibsen, middle class plays existed in the "burgher dramas" of Lessing and Goethe, in Diderot, and in a few British post-Restoration works. For the most part, however, these works took Christian morality as a given guide to bourgeois morality, and never examined how humanism would push the boundaries of moral norms.

Unlike these other authors, Ibsen more keenly understood the manner in which the middle class had already emerged in most of Europe— perhaps because Ibsen lived on the continent only after growing up in the cultural backwater of his native Norway, which lagged generations behind Western Europe in social trends and government institutions that promoted the middle class (such as copyright protection, which Ibsen lacked for most of his life).

So where Shaw— in the full fruition of middle-class English life—enjoyed the luxury of studying the more specific political problems brought about by industrialization and its excess, Ibsen filled a void by exploring the ethical implications of the freedom brought by middle class wealth. This alone makes his works useful today.

From Nebraska to England

To be sure, contemporary American playwrights still tackle the central struggle of individual self-realization against the norms of society. And though few writers explore this theme in the lives of the middle class, a few notable contenders stand out:

— Donald Margulies's Dinner with Friends, for example, contrasts the behavior that sustains (or fails to sustain) the marriages of two couples who became good friends via the commonality of married life.

— David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole explores this theme through a woman's refusal to resume the roles of wife and mother after the death of her four-year-old son.

— Tracy Letts's protagonist in Man from Nebraska abandons— Ó la Gauguin— his family routine and the religious beliefs that tie him to middle America for England's cosmopolitan allure. There, he discovers art, sensuality and a range of beliefs that expand the fullness of his humanity.

Social consequences

Modern audiences don't balk at the social consequences of these deeds. But such decisions come with a social cost to one's self and one's family. Ibsen recognized this fact in dramatic terms, and he represented the mores of society through one or more characters, external to the family, who peer in on the main action to let the protagonist know that someone disapproves of him.

In some cases, contemporary playwrights (like the three I mentioned above) fail to include external characters because few producers risk budgets on scripts with more than five characters. But this "social other" in Ibsen's plays enabled him to incorporate the trifecta of guilt, shame and duty. In The Master Builder, Solness must overcome his duty to his wife; in A Doll's House, Nora's self-realization staves off the guilt over abandoning her children. In Hedda Gabler, the heroine chooses suicide over shame, itself represented in menacing form by Judge Brack.

Calling all playwrights

These elements provide Ibsen with layers of conflict that accentuate and intensify his dramas and raise the stakes considerably. Our modern middle-class dramas are poorer for the absence of these elements.

I'm not advocating a return to quaint notions of guilt or cardboard villains holding antiquated moral positions. But surely some playwright can, like Ibsen 100 years ago, enrich contemporary drama by incorporating the social risks still inherent in the individual's struggle to become. If no one will try, then we need good productions of Ibsen to remind us of the risks that may befall us.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.