Gint Program

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

This phantasmagoria, or comedy of human life, embraces all the elements of the serious, the pathetic, the tragic, the grotesque, the real and the unreal, the actualities and the dreams, the
facts and the consequences, the ambitions and the disappointments, the hopes and the disillusions, and the dread and the terror, and the resurrection in love, of the human soul.

This description was written by Richard Mansfield, producer, director and player of Peer, in the first English
production of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. His production, with a cast and crew of almost 400 plus a concert sized orchestra and all the equipment necessary for stunning special effects, required eleven railway cars to deliver it to Chicago for it’s premier in October of 1906.

Romulus Linney’s adaptation,(GINT) of Ibsen’s rich, sweeping, and deeply philosophical play, blessedly does not require eleven railway cars of production and in its simple and elegant rendering has lost none of the essential elements
of story and meaning described above by Mansfield.

Ibsen’s story of an outcast’s long and passionate journey in search of self drew on Norwegian folktales and was set in the mountains of Norway and around the world and back again. Linney has transplanted the story into another part of the world rich in folk lore, the Appalachian Mountains
and around the world and back again. Ibsen’s trolls have become Linney’s razor back hogs and a soul collecting
button molder a Cherokee medicine man, but as Peer/Pete takes off the layers of an onion, metaphorically peeling himself back through the journey his life has been, both
Ibsen and Linney pose for us the story’s essential question,
“What does it mean to be oneself?”