The Wild Duck; BAM Next Wave Festival October 28, 2006

Regarded by many as Ibsen's masterwork, 'The Wild Duck' has pride of place in Norway's National Theatre. But rather than present it as a museum piece, artistic director Eirik Stubo (in his US debut) has set the action in the late 1950s, an era marked by a certain innocence yet far from Ibsen's own. This shift sheds a radical new light on the play. So do subtle changes in the original text that both modernize and heighten Ibsen's themes, allowing us to see the characters not as archetypes but as plausible individuals.