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.
Peer Gynt lovers – the deeply committed Solveig and the superficial Peer, who is more a surface for projections than a coherent character. The simplest conclusion one may draw from "Peer Gynt", is expressed in the eloquent prose of the author: “"If you lie; are you real?"” The literary critic Harold Bloom of New York University in his book "The Western Canon" has challenged the conventional reading of "Peer Gynt", stating:Far more than Goethe's Faust, Peer is the one nineteenth-century literary character who has the largeness of the grandest characters of Renaissance imaginings. Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Hugo, even Balzac have no single