The Master Builder
Play Description
Originally published in 1892 and first performed in 1893, THE MASTER BUILDER explores the needs of the artist in relation to those of society and the limits of artistic creativity. There is an autobiographical element in the depiction of the aging architect, Halvard Solness, who feels pressure from a younger, more idealistic and ambitious generation of architects and fears the decay of his own creativity.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Author(s)
Henrik IbsenHenrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) was a Norwegian dramatist and is considered the father of the modem drama. He first won worldwide attention with A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879). His next play, GHOSTS, dealt openly with the topic of venereal disease and aroused great opposition. He replied to his critics by writing AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (1881), where he showed that an individual may be right while society is wrong. His other plays include PEER GYNT (1867), THE WILD DUCK (1884), ROSMERSHOLM (1886), THE LADY FROM THE SEA (1888), HEDDA GABLER (1890), THE MASTER BUILDER (1892), LITTLE EYOLF (1894), JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN (1896), and WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN (1899).
Kenneth McLeishKenneth McLeish (1940 – 1997) studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. After starting as a schoolteacher, he became a full-time translator, author, and dramatist, and in time the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain. His output included all 47 of the surviving classical Greek plays, most of Ibsen and Feydeau, as well as individual plays by Plautus, Molière, Jarry, Strindberg, Horvath, and Labiche. His original plays and translations have been widely performed, most notably by England's National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Book Information
| Publisher | Nick Hern Books |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 9/1/1997 |
| Pages | 96 |
| ISBN | 9781854593511 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$0.00–$15.00
Play Description
The title character, based on a legendary Norwegian folk hero, is a rogue who is saved by the love of a woman. Peer Gynt is a charming but arrogant peasant youth who leaves his widowed mother in order to seek his fortune. Confident of success, he has one disastrous adventure after another. In one, he attends the wedding of the wealthy young woman he himself might have married. There he meets Solveig, who falls in love with him. He impulsively abducts the bride from her wedding celebration and subsequently abandons her. Peer Gynt embarks on a series of fantastic voyages around the world, finding wealth and fame but never happiness. Finally, as an old, disillusioned man, he returns to Norway, where Solveig, ever faithful, welcomes him lovingly, and he is redeemed.
Production Info
Cast: 28 total (10 female, 18 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Richard Nelson’s critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg’s classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00
Play Description
In THE UNDERPANTS, she is waiting in the crowd — Berlin, circa 1910 — craning her neck forward to see the Kaiser pass by. Her panties fall down. It is possible that the Kaiser might see them at her feet. What crisis could be bigger than that? Carl Sternheim poses this question at the outset of THE STERNHEIM TRILOGY. By the end, the lady is pregnant, pregnant, one might say, with the future of the booboisie in the person of THE SNOB, Christian Maske, who rises, in the second part, from the lower booboisie to the higher. In the third part, 1913, Christian rises higher all the way to the top of bourgeois society in twentieth-century mode. The whole crisis of 1914–1918 looms. 1933–1945 is not far away.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (3 female, 9 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Eric Overmyer’s sparkling adaptation and synthesis of Beaumarchais’s THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO and Ödön von Horváth’s FIGARO GETS A DIVORCE. FIGARO/FIGARO follows the iconic characters of Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess Almaviva, and other favorites through the ups and downs inherent in all relationships — husband and wife, master and servant, family ties and the like.
Production Info
Cast: 17 total (6 female, 11 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
Play Description
A comedy set at that epicenter of misunderstandings in 1990, just a year after the Berlin Wall was opened up and as its slow demolition was underway, and a year after the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male)Short Comedy (about 45 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A domestic comedy whose homosexual character is part of an ordinary family that views his sexual orientation as unnatural. When the play was first produced in 1922, it enjoyed two performances and then was quietly removed from the repertory as too progressive for its time. It is, however, just right for ours.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Strindberg’s classic on the dissolution of a marriage is given an enthralling new translation by master translator Laurence Senelick.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 170 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
A selfish, cynical woman bored by her marriage to the scholar Jorgen Tesman, Hedda Gabler's father's pair of pistols provide intermittent diversion, as do the attentions of the ne'er-do-well Judge Brack. When Thea Elvestad, a longtime acquaintance of Hedda's, reveals that she has left her husband for the writer Ejlert Lovborg, who once pursued Hedda, the latter becomes vengeful. Learning that Ejlert has forsworn liquor, Hedda first steers him to a rowdy gathering at Brack's and subsequently burns the reputedly brilliant manuscript that he loses there while drunk. Witnessing his desperation, she sends him one of the pistols, and he shoots himself. Brack deduces Hedda's complicity and demands that she become his mistress in exchange for his silence about the matter. Instead, she ends her ennui with the remaining pistol. The work is remarkable for its nonjudgmental depiction of an immoral, destructive character, one of the most vividly realized women in dramatic literature.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Anthony Clarvoe's adaptation of THE WILD DUCK remains remarkably faithful to Ibsen's masterpiece.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Len Jenkin’s surrealistic comedy uses Franz Kafka’s story “Ein Landarzt” as a point of departure to explore his personal life and literary works.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 75 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Ferdinand is an army major and son of President von Walter, a high-ranking noble in a German duke’s court, while Luise Miller is the daughter of a middle-class musician. The couple fall in love with each other, but both their fathers tell them to end their affair. The President instead wants to expand his own influence by marrying Ferdinand to Lady Milford, the duke’s mistress, but Ferdinand rebels against his father’s plan and tries to persuade Luise to elope with him.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (2 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00
Play Description
Why, having become Queen in childhood, would Christina of Sweden give up the throne? Confused about her sexual identity and religious beliefs, and thwarted in love, she decides to abdicate, convert to Catholicism, and throw herself, for life, on the hospitality of the Vatican. Once there, this proud but troubled woman is stunned to discover that, before she can be received by the Pope, she must submit to intense questioning by Cardinal Azzolino. At first she sees him as an adversary. But then, against all rules and expectations, Christina finds herself falling in love with her inquisitor. A probing exploration of the nature of woman, whether queen or commoner, is the subject of this highly original play.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 140 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes