The Wild Duck

"Henrik Ibsen was the worst kind of scold--a Scandinavian Protestant-hating Scandinavian Protestant whose plays are grimly righteous attacks on the hypocrisies of a grimly righteous bourgeois culture. Right? Well, that's what I thought until I saw this high-energy Court Theatre production of his 1884 play about two families bound by some ugly secrets."

"The soaring stagehouse of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art has become a spatial playpen for Charles Newell, the restlessly intelligent artistic director of the Court Theatre, and Leigh Breslau, a Chicago architect by trade who insists in his biographies that he is not a set designer, but he is actually a very gifted one."

 

"...a very arresting piece of large-scale theater that flows from fervent creative minds..."

"I've got one other thing to say about these three shows: They represent the growth in Chicago of a new "auteur triumvirate" in Gaines, Newell and Falls. All three of these mature Chicago directors are at their peaks, with creative and competitive juices flowing in equal measure."

"...a whole new, eye-opening take on Ibsen's world. Credit Court Theatre's production of "The Wild Duck." Director Charles Newell (who works miracles with every script he touches these days), translator-playwright Richard Nelson and a sublime Chicago cast not only have found the arch human comedy in this play, but they have managed to turn a social critique and family tragedy verging on melodrama into a work that might have come from the more graceful and amusing pen of Ibsen's contemporary, Anton Chekhov."