While offering a mixed appraisal of the Phoenix theatrical companies production o/Peer Gynt, Brustein has nothing but praise for the power and literary significance of Ibsen's play.

The intentions of the Phoenix company, which aspires to create a repertory of "time-honored and modern classics," are lofty and honorable, but their productions this year have overwhelmed me with fatigue, impatience, and gloom. My anguished imagination is now subject to a fearful hallucination in which I see the finest works of the greatest dramatists strewn about the Phoenix stage like so many violated corpses, while a chorus of newspaper reviewers gleefully sings dirges in the wings. Perhaps it is unfair to blame anyone but the reviewers themselves for the absurdities they write about Aristophanes and Ibsen; certainly, journalists occupied with exalting the present have always been inclined to knock the past. Yet, it cannot be denied that the...