Award-winning Playwright and Theatre Scholar Presents

Published: April 12, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes

Southern Utah University’s Convocation Lecture Series is pleased to announce Dr. Eric Samuelson will be delivering a presentation called, “Henrik Ibsen: The Father of Modern Drama”. This presentation will be held on Tuesday April 13, at 11:30 a.m. in the SUU Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

Henrik Ibsen is widely recognized at the father of modern drama. Theatre historian Oscar Brockett wrote, “Whether realistic or nonrealistic, almost all drama after Ibsen was influenced by his conviction that art should be a source of insights, a creator of discussion, a conveyor of ideas, something more than mere entertainment.” (History of the Theatre) The 2009-2010 school years marks the 160th anniversary of Henrik Ibsen's first play Catilina, the 110th anniversary of his last play When We Dead Awaken, and the 125th anniversary of his masterpiece The Wild Duck a play that is, in many ways, metaphorically parallel to Ibsen’s career.

Dr. Eric Samuelsen is an award-winning playwright and a theatre scholar who teaches Ibsen in both English and the original Norwegian. Eric taught at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio before joining the BYU faculty in 1992. He became head of the Playwriting program at BYU in 1999. He has also taught as an adjunct faculty member in the Religion department. As a playwright, Eric has had seventeen plays professionally produced in New York, California, Louisiana, Utah, and Indiana. Some of his plays include Gadianton, which has seen three professional productions across the country, A Love Affair with Electrons, Family, and The Way We're Wired, which was most recently produced by the Nauvoo Theatrical Society as part of their inaugural season. He is a member of the Playwrights' Circle, and the Dramatists Guild. He is three-time winner of the Annual Award in Playwriting offered by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML). He became president of AML in 2007. His novel, Singled Out, was published by Cornerstone Publishing in 2000. He is also a staff writer for the on-line satirical magazine "The Sugarbeet." He was featured in the book Conversations with Mormon Authors, edited by Chris Bigelow. He has published scholarly articles on 19th and 20th century Scandinavian Theatre, and more recently, on LDS film.

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