Peer Gynt at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. In 1981, Houston Ballet presented "Peer Gynt" as adapted by Artistic Director Ben Stevenson, OBE. In 1989, John Neumeier created a ballet "freely based on Ibsen's play", for which Alfred Schnittke composed the score. In 1998, the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, Rhode Island commissioned David Henry Hwang and Swiss director Stephan Muller to do an adaptation of "Peer Gynt". In 1998, playwright Romulus Linney directed his adaptation of the play, entitled "Gint", at the Theatre for the New City in New York. This adaptation moved the play's action to 20th-century Appalachia and California.
The Master Builder Builder" can be taken as one of realism: the destructive outcome of a middle-aged, professional man's infatuation with a younger, teasing woman or, as critic Desmond MacCarthy describes this concept of the work: the tragedy of an "elderly architect who falls off his scaffold while trying to show off before a young lady". If, however, one takes Solness's belief in his powers at their face value, the play also can be a lyrical and poetic fairy tale, in the manner of "Peer Gynt" travelling the Earth in his magical adventures while the faithful Solveig waits for his return. On stage,