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For Immediate Release: February 25, 2008
Brown Theatre
PR Contacts:
Brian Gaston, Box Office Manager - 401-863-2730
Selena Brown, Public Relations Assistant - theatrepr@brown.edu
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Brown Theatre and Sock & Buskin present:
Peer Gynt
Written by Henrik Ibsen
Adapted and directed by John Emigh
March 6-9 & 13-16, 2008
Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 2 PM
Stuart Theatre in the Catherine Bryan Dill Center for the Performing Arts
77 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912
Box Office: (401) 863-2730
Tickets now available online!
www.brown.edu/tickets
Peer Gynt -- not your grandfather’s Ibsen! Before he wrote his celebrated realist plays, Ibsen penned this sprawling, epic masterwork - wondering himself if it could ever be staged. Escaping the stifling village life around him, a young man sets out to prove himself, and encounters lust, love, riches, madness, adulation, self-betrayal, some royal trolls, the fabled Sphinx, the devil himself, his own limitations, and a chance for redemption. Like nothing written before or since, Peer Gynt celebrates the energy and vitality of Romanticism while skewering its excesses. It continues to challenge and enliven our theatre and our lives. It’s an epic story about a man that rumbles from one misadventure to another trying to learn how to exist with others or to define that ability, a sort of Nietzschean self-fulfillment. Through the story the characters learn the human face occasionally moving toward the abstract or an idea of being alive with a certain imaginative richness of a script written for a theatre that didn’t yet exist. In fact, in order to create the world of Peer Gynt, Brown’s Stuart Theatre was rebuilt, placing the first six rows on stage and ship wreck right in the middle on the space. The production is not historically bound, enriching the text with music ranging from Grieg’s Mountain King, to rap, to Shakira. You’ll see belly dancing, showgirls, and pole dancing, monkeys and trolls, and features the talents of master puppet-makers Big Nazo and Brian Gaston.
About the Playwright
Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828 to a mercantile family. When his ambitions to become a doctor soured after failing to make the grade, Ibsen discovered his true calling when he learned the theatrical trade. Perhaps art imitates life, for he left Norway and settled in Rome, where he wrote Peer Gynt, which is, itself, a travelogue of sorts. He is counted among the greatest playwrights of the 19th century and wrote against both the values of his contemporary audience and the accepted modes of theatre-making of his day, shattering the standards of his time and changing theatre forever. However, in the humble and revered opinion of the director, Ibsen is often overestimated as a political thinker and underestimated as a poet; Peer Gynt was written by the Ibsen that everyone forgot.
About the Director
John Emigh is a theatre director and performer who has written on the masked theatre and rituals of New Guinea, Bali, and India, as well as on Western theatrical practices. He has wanted to direct Peer Gynt for many years, since his youth, and for many reasons. Most immediately, the intrigue of using mask and puppetry intrigued him and his production has many, however, Emigh asserts that the talented, flexible cast of Peer Gynt needs no masking except in the most abstract of moments. Like peeling the many layers of an onion, this is his methodology of exposing Peer. In Peer Gynt, John Emigh recognizes himself enough to be embarrassed and hopes the same for the audience.
John Emigh is the author of several articles and books including Masked Performance: the Place of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. In 43 years at Brown University, Emigh has directed over 50 productions with Brown Students. He is a joint-appointed professor in the Theatre, Speech and Dance and English Departments, and has been teaching and directing for decades. In addition to working with universities as well as the professional theatre, he has acted with leading Balinese artists and has performed one-man shows based on Balinese mask techniques in a variety of venues throughout the United states, Bali, and India. Current projects include investigating links between the traditional concerns of theatre and recent findings in the field of neuro-science and preparing a museum exhibit and international conference on the mask and concepts of person for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, as well as research on the carnival and Christmas traditions of masked performance in Alpine Europe and Mexico. He retires in 2009 and will be deeply missed.
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