Skip to content

Prior playreadings

Henrik Ibsen – A Doll’s House

This month we read a play written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, that deals with the fate of a married woman, who, at that time in Norway, lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. Despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play, it was a great sensation at the time and caused a “storm of outraged controversy” that went beyond the theater to the world of newspapers and society.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others, and which we see in the theater to this day. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll’s House was the world’s most performed play in 2006.

David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole

This extraordinarily well written play involving family members dealing with deep loss in their individual ways – and in ways that we all can recognize in ourselves and in our own families. The play was adapted to make a successful movie starring Nicole Kidman in 2010.

Christopher Durang, “Beyond Therapy”

When we read “Beyond Therapy” in our March play reading meeting, the emotional power of black comedy became very real for all of us. The exaggeration of rather serious issues and the crazy responses of the characters, we all found ourselves laughing constantly at their words and behavior. What was especially fun was to experience how each of us got more and more into our characters as we read the play together – even to the point of laughing, crying, yelling and other physical clues in response to our emotional involvement in the moment.