Henrik Ibsen: this often misunderstood Norwegian playwright once remarked, "With pleasure I will torpedo the ark." As a young writer, he was discontent with everything. He found himself unable to identify with any existing forms of drama, so Henrik Ibsen set out to create his own.

Along the way, Ibsen experienced multiple shifts in dramatic form and philosophy as he gradually came to terms with the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual forces that were at war within his complex psyche. But throughout, his plays are characterized by their rebellious spirit and their unforgiving scrutiny of Ibsen's own faults and virtues.

Ibsen's early plays are wild and epic, utilizing an open form and concentrating on mystical, romantic, poetic visions of the rebel figure in search of an ultimate truth which is always just out of reach. In Brand, revolts against God, howling at the heavens, like Prometheus, only to be punished with a huge avalanche which buries him alive. In Peer Gynt, a young man rebels against society by choosing to live a life of waste, only to find himself, ultimately, living in a world of lost opportunities. Emperor and Galilean traces the life of the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian, a disenchanted youth who seeks out a variety of religious experiences in a search for beauty and truth, but eventually, after failing to find contentment, devotes himself to overthrowing the stage religion of Christianity.

With The League of Youth, Ibsen begins his "modern" phase--an eleven year period during which he would consciously suppress his Romanticism along with his poetry and mysticism and focus instead on the problems of modern society. These plays are characterized by their "realism," a self-imposed discipline which the playwright hoped would help audiences to more easily digest his radical views. This period produced several masterpieces, including Ghosts and Hedda Gabbler, but the aging playwright continued to suffer harsh attacks from his critics.

In his final period, Ibsen returned to the more mystical subjects of his youth, tempered now by the Classical restraint of his middle period. Embittered by the lack of public enthusiasm for some of his plays, the dramatist painted a moving portrait in The Master Builder of an aging architect who, having given up his dreams of building great monuments and churches with towers reaching up to the heavens, instead devotes his life to building regular houses for people to live in. When the architect finally realizes that society doesn't even appreciate his sacrifice, he returns once again to the more mystical structures of his youth. Although Henrik Ibsen was never fully appreciated during his lifetime, he has since come to be recognized as one of the great dramatists of all time and the "Father of Modern Drama."

This Theatre was erected in 1664-8 to a design by Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) from funds donated by Gilbert Sheldon (1598-1677), who during his long career held office as Warden of All Souls Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury and was elected as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. In 1994 the Theatre was described by the European Commission as "one of the architectural jewels of Oxford". Its purpose was to provide an appropriate secular venue for the principal meetings and public ceremonies of the University, and this remains its purpose today.

However, in addition to being a functional building of the University of Oxford, it is made available for hire to those who wish to promote recitals of serious music and other similar functions. It is also open as circumstances allow to those who wish to visit the building for its historical, architectural and contemporary interest.

More specifically, the Sheldonian Theatre is available for hire by conference organisers who wish either to hold larger gatherings than can be managed comfortably in a single college or who wish to take advantage of its architectural attractions.

The seating capacity is up to 1,000 for conferences and 800 for concerts and there is a substantial floor area for presentational material. Although the theatre does not have all the features which may be required for business sessions, it has been used successfully for formal opening or closing meetings. It is also eminently suited for musical entertainments for prestige conferences, for which it has experienced staff.

Should you wish to use the theatre for these or other purposes, Mrs Sue Waldman at the Theatre will be pleased to talk to you.

Tickets for concerts and other events are not available from the Sheldonian Theatre, but are available from the Oxford Playhouse.Other 

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking back on his childhood, he once remarked, "I had little talent for happiness."

Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy conversation--it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up--but the women could not resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce's daughter, that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.

In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Shortly after he arrived, a mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce, and Beckett quickly became an apostle of the older writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an essay in defense of Joyce's magnum opus against the public's lazy demand for easy comprehensibility. A year later, he won his first literary prize--10 pounds for a poem entitled "Whoroscope" which dealt with the philosopher Descartes meditating on the subject of time and the transiency of life. After writing a study of Proust, however, Beckett came to the conclusion that habit and routine were the "cancer of time", so he gave up his post at Trinity College and set out on a nomadic journey across Europe.

Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these aquaintances would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.

Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed in the street by a man who had approached him asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital, that he had a perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison. When asked why he had attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur", a phrase hauntingly reminiscent of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate the writer's later works.

During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris--even after it had become occupied by the Germans. He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942 when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after it had been liberated from the Germans, he returned to Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five years that followed, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism.

Samuel Beckett's first play, Eleutheria, mirrors his own search for freedom, revolving around a young man's efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations. His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone. In spite of some expectations to the contrary, the strange little play in which "nothing happens" became an instant success, running for four hundred performances at the Théâtre de Babylone and enjoying the critical praise of dramatists as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder, and William Saroyan who remarked, "It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre." Perhaps the most famous production of Waiting for Godot, however, took place in 1957 when a company of actors from the San Francisco Actor's Workshop presented the play at the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over fourteen hundred convicts. Surprisingly, the production was a great success. The prisoners understood as well as Vladimir and Estragon that life means waiting, killing time and clinging to the hope that relief may be just around the corner. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow.

Beckett secured his position as a master dramatist on April 3, 1957 when his second masterpiece, Endgame, premiered (in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Although English was his native language, all of Beckett's major works were originally written in French--a curious phenomenon since Beckett's mother tongue was the accepted international language of the twentieth century. Apparently, however, he wanted the discipline and economy of expression that an acquired language would force upon on him.

Beckett's dramatic works do not rely on the traditional elements of drama. He trades in plot, characterization, and final solution, which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for a series of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressable. His characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling on, endlessly.

Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international fame. His works have been translated into over twenty languages. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

NEIL SIMON

Marvin Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, the second son of Irving Simon, a Jewish travelling salesman, and his wife Mamie. He grew up in the Bronx in New York City.

As early as 1948 he was writing scripts together with his brother Danny for radio and television. His sketches for Phil Silvers, Gary Moore, Jerry Lewis etc. contributed to his wide acclaim. He and his brother separated and Neil began writing for the New York theater scene.
full name: Marvin Neil Simon
born: July 4, 1927 in Bronx, NY
parents: Irving (salesperson) and Mamie Simon
married: Joan Baim (dancer), September 10, 1953 (died, 1973)
married: Marsha Mason (actress), October 25, 1973 (divorced, 1982)
married: Diane Lander, 1987 (divorced, 1988)
remarried: Diane Lander, 1990
children: (first marriage) Ellen, Nancy; (third marriage) Bryn (adopted daughter)
education: attended New York University, 1946, and University of Denver

Novelist, essayist, playwright, and founder of a new school of thought which would become known as Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. After graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy, he served in the French Army from 1929-31. He then served as schoolmaster for several years at Le Havre, Lyon, and Paris. He published his first novel, Nausea, in 1938, and a year later, a volume of short stories entitled The Wall. His literary career, however, was put on hold in 1939 when the French Army was mobilized. He was taken prisoner in June of 1940 and imprisoned in Staleg XIID near Trier. After nine months in the German prison camp, Sartre managed to escape and made his way to Paris where he joined the French Underground.

Somehow, in spite of the German occupation, Sartre managed not only to write another book, but to get two plays produced in the occupied capital. In 1943, Charles Dullin produced Sartre's first play, Les Mouches or The Flies, at the Théâtre de la Cité. In The Flies, Sartre uses the classic Oresteian myth as a vehicle for his existential philosophy. The play revolves around the return of Orestes to his homeland, Argos, several years after the murder of his father at the hands of his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistheus. Rejecting the sense of guilt which the murderers have forced upon the people of Argos and established as the state religion, Orestes avenges his fathers death and liberates his homeland. Sartre's political message was clear: do not hesitate to kill not only Germans but also French collaborators if this is the only means of liberating France.

A year later, a company using the once famous Théâtre du Vieux-Columbier produced his second play, a one-act entitled No Exit which tells the story of a demoniacal lesbian, a spoiled society woman, and a cowardly journalist who find themselves trapped in Hell. They are held captive in a single chamber in which they must eternally torment one another with the awareness of their delusions and their failures as human beings. In the end, they come to the realization that "There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is--other people!"

Sartre's other plays include The Respectful Prostitute (1946), Dirty Hands (1948), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), and The Condemned of Altona (1959). In addition to plays, his works include important philosophical works and novels. His awards include the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (1947), Grand Novel Prize (1950), and the Omegna Prize (1960). In 1964, Sartre declined the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Paris on April 15, 1980.

Laughing Gas Theatre Group in Coral Gables

Coconut Grove Playhouse    Miami-Dade County, Miami

Crest Theatre  Palm Beach County, Delray Beach
Old School Square Cultural Arts Center

Florida Shakespeare Theatre   Miami-Dade County, Coral Gables

Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts   Miami-Dade County, Miami

Key West Theaters & Art Galleries    Monroe County

Little Palm Family Theatre   Palm Beach County, Boca Raton
Non-profit theatre provides live theater each weekend, musical theater camp, acting classes, school field trips and outreach programs

Caldwell Theatre Company   Palm Beach County, Boca Raton

Coral Sky Amphitheatre   West Palm Beach, Palm Beach County

The Kravis Center    West Palm Beach

Naples Players   Collier County, Naples
The Sugden Community Theatre

Pembroke Pines Theatre of the Performing Arts   Broward County, Pembroke Pines *

Broward Center for the Performing Arts   Broward County, Ft. Lauderdale

Hollywood Boulevard Theater   Broward County, Hollywood

Sun-Sentinel Theater Index    Broward County

Fort Lauderdale Children's Theatre   Broward County, Ft. Lauderdale

Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre   Lee County, Fort Myers

Philharmonic Center for the Arts    Collier County, Naples

Eugène Ionesco

Alfred Jarry

Harold Pinter

Edward Albee

Bertolt Brecht

Georg Büchner

Albert Camus

Caryl Churchill

Pierre Corneille

Friedrich Durrenmatt

Dario Fo

Lillian Hellman

Beth Henley

David Mamet

Arthur Miller

Eugene O'Neill

Luigi Pirandello

Jean Racine

Friedrich Schiller

Sam Shepard

Wole Soyinka

Tom Stoppard

Frank Wedekind

Tennessee Williams

August Wilson

Theatre Reviews:(collected by NYT)
Off-Broadway
On-Broadway

Yale School of Drama  
The Yale School of Drama develops the skills, crafts and attitudes of its students to prepare them for careers in the professional theater, 
in particular for the demands of repertory and ensemble production in permanent theater companies such as the Yale Repertory Theatre. Although many graduates are successful in other forms of theatrical production or are qualified to teach, the primary focus of the School is training for the professional, resident company.

The Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre (YRT) together are a unique conservatory for theater training within the University. In each discipline of the School of Drama, the aesthetic sensibility is translated into the language of the stage. The process of applying theory to professional practice is central to the School and is subject to faculty supervision, observation and evaluation. The conservatory within the University teaches the crafts of the theater, while the intellectual world of the University informs our critical and aesthetic ideals.

American Academy of the Dramatic Arts  

Founded in New York in 1884, the The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was the first conservatory in the United States dedicated to the training of professional actors. It became the primary training ground for beginning actors and introduced systematic techniques for creating characters on stage. The Academy has played a seminal role in theatre arts in America.

With a campus in New York and another in Hollywood, the Academy is the only         accredited conservatory for actors located in America's two dynamic centers for the acting profession.

The Academy trains actors for stage, film and television by means of a structured, professionally- oriented program that stresses self-discovery, self- discipline and individuality.

Academy training is, above all, practical. At each stage of development, students are challenged to put what has been studied in classrooms to the test in performance.

The soundness of this approach is reflected in the achievements of Academy alumni- a diverse body of professionals who have distinguished themselves throughout the entertainment world. To date, performances by Academy alumni have been nominated for 70 Oscars®, 54 Tonys and 181 Emmys.

The Academy is a non-profit educational institution, chartered by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York since 1899. Its New York campus is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and its California campus by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges; both campuses are accredited by the National Association of Schools of Theatre.