Resolving Hedda

"Henrik Ibsen: Ahead of his time. Father of modern drama. Often considered an early male feminist for confronting the constraints on women in the 19th century. The title character of one of his plays has a bone to pick with him, though. Hedda Gabler has had enough of being strong and uncompromising yet given just one means of independence at the end of her story: by killing herself. So she's been bursting...to try to wrest control of HEDDA GABLER and chart a new course. She's winning audience after audience to her side in Jon Klein's boisterous new comedy RESOLVING HEDDA... One of the pricklier characters in the dramatic canon, Hedda--introduced to the world in 1891--has never had a problem speaking her mind, and that quality is only intensified here. She glares at the heavens, heaping scorn on the Norwegian master as she tries to think of ways to circumvent his precision-crafted plot, which piles indignities on her while blocking avenues of escape -- `the perfect killing machine', as she bitterly describes it. Ibsen gives her plenty of qualities to help her along: fierce intelligence, bravery and tenacity. Other traits must be fought. `I'm bored and willful and perverse', she says ruefully, `at least according to Wikipedia'. Yes, Wikipedia. For all of her Victorian trappings, Hedda is very much a woman of 2017. She's been keeping current these last 126 years and drops offhand references to Oprah's Book Club and phone apps, as well as uttering the occasional curse word. The other characters don't know what to make of her as she restlessly paces her elegant drawing room. Her ineffectual academician of a husband, George, is flustered even more than usual; still, he and the others keep following the paths that lead toward her usual fate while she tries to steer them elsewhere, all while she battles props--pistols, a sole-copy manuscript--that keep playing into the action exactly as Ibsen wrote them. The comic tone spreads to the others, however... Klein, the author of such previous Victory hits as T BONE N WEASEL and WISHING WELL, delivers laughs at a steady pace... Pure entertainment is its own reward, though, and RESOLVING HEDDA, by its very existence, makes a larger statement. However much Hedda might abuse him, Ibsen deserves her--and our--admiration for writing so forcefully about issues that perpetually bedevil us... It's good to have him still at our side." Daryl H Miller, Los Angeles Times "Henrik and Hedda, a hilarious pair... Its author is the brilliantly clever and witty Jon Klein...Klein's hilarious script." Cynthia Citron, Santa Monica Daily Press

This Play Guide is specifically written for A Level students who are studying Hedda Gabler as part of the AQA A Level Drama & Theatre specification. It provides structured support for Component 1: Section A - Drama and theatre. / This book is divided into three sections: How to explore a text for A level Drama and Theatre, with vocabulary-building sections on acting, directing and design; An extended exploration of the play to enrich students' understanding and response to the text; Targeted examination preparation to improve writing and test-taking skills. / Fully supports the written examination and helps students develop their key knowledge and understanding of key A Level drama & theatre skills. / Knowledge and understanding of the play are developed with a synopsis, character and scene studies, contextual and practical exploration. / Includes a wide range of practical drama tasks, activities, and research and revision exercises. / Advice on how to interpret and prepare for exam questions with examples of effective responses.

Dramatic Realism, since its birth in the hectic late years of the nineteenth century, gave theatrical and thematic energy to the interaction between a play’s text and the way that it looked on the stage. Characters began to find themselves in rooms and settings that played an active and changing role in the drama, and their dialogue and reactions evolved in time with these changes. As life itself became more elaborate during the 20th Century, so these rooms were invaded and then defined by the outside world. Fred Miller Robinson’s enjoyable and stimulating essays on this enduring genre tackle the dreams and anxieties of the middles classes of the Industrial Revolution – dreams of domestic comfort and refuge, and anxieties about how entrapping that comfort could be. Moving from Ibsen to Chekhov and onwards into later plays in which the reality of ‘Realism’ comes under scrutiny, this is a book to dip into before a performance or to study during a class.

How to remain fresh, focused, creative, productive, and healthy in the face of enormous stress is an important challenge facing leaders within the modern organization, regardless of the organization or the level of leadership. Providing a way to successfully address this challenge is the primary goal of this book. The book recognizes that stress can actually be a positive force for enhancing performance if it is managed effectively, offering an optimistic message for leaders facing ongoing pressures in their work. What Dr. German does in his book is to offer knowledge and practical strategies, based on solid research, to help leaders better manage the distress, or negative stress, inherent in their role. In addition, the book provides tools to develop a personal resiliency enhancement plan to allow leaders better access to the wave of positive energy that comes from experiencing good stress, also called eustress. The information offered in the book is creatively presented as part of a training program involving leaders, making the material an intriguing read as well as an invitation to be part of the learning process shared by others serving in the leadership role.

The classic story of a woman who retained her maiden name while married to a boring pedant and who took perverse delight in subjegating that sex which took her sex for granted. She plays her husband for a fool, and she systematically destroys first the manuscript and then the life of the male friend who idolizes her, before she exercises her own right to coup de grace.

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Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salom has had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression is the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism and Salom as a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde's Salom marks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde and Salom are seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarm , Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.

Hedda Gabler is bored with everything, even her marriage. Resigning herself to a life of domesticity, she becomes nervous when her husband reveals they are tight on money. Hedda begins manipulating the lives of others, leading to multiple tragedies.

Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from 1912 through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter—male or female—or almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and won Academy Awards for writing "The Big House" and "The Champ."