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CATHY WURZER: It's 8:24. And I'm Cathy Wurzer. Did this year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Hundreds of events will be held around the world in the next few months to commemorate Ibsen. His works are still popular among performers and theater goers worldwide. He was also a respected poet.

Dominic Papatola is Minnesota Public Radio's arts critic and a St. Paul Pioneer Press theater critic. And he's come by today to tell us more about Henrik Ibsen. And I have to be honest with you, the last time I talked about Ibsen was back in college.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: I have to say, Cathy, a couple of minutes ago when you first mentioned Ibsen, I could see your face just go blank. And I think this is how people react to Ibsen. But we all learned in intro to theater class. We probably forgot this, but Henrik Ibsen is the father of the modern drama.

And the reason that they call him that is he's the guy who put the drama in drama. He put in the guts, and the viscera, and the psychological realism, characters who were talking about what was really going on in their heads as opposed to just fo-fo-fo, talking about the wallpaper on the wall.

CATHY WURZER: Fa-fa, yes.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: This is a guy who wrote a play about syphilis or that had syphilis as a theme in 1882. So he was in front of his time. He was the father of modernism. People still do his plays. And the reason that people do his plays--

CATHY WURZER: They must resonate.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: Well they're free. They're in the public domain. That's one of the reasons that people keep doing them. But the other reason that the people do them is that they're still amazingly contemporary. And the guy was like, no theatrical purists will fall over. But he was like the Jerry Springer of his day.

CATHY WURZER: The Jerry Springer of his day?

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: Enemy of the People as a play is about a whistleblower who finds environmental contamination in some medicinal springs and tells everybody about it and wrecks the town, Hedda Gabler, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. She's driven to desperation and gun play, Nora, and A Doll's House abandons her wife and her children because she just can't stand anymore.

This is stuff that you don't-- you look at an Ibsen play that was written 80, 90 or 110 years ago, well, not 80 or 90 because he died 100 years ago, and you think there's still stuff that's going on here that still plays. It's not some dusty old relic. They are Norwegians shuffling around, mumbling, yes, I'll grant you that. But they're talking about stuff that's still interesting.

CATHY WURZER: How is he received back in the day?

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: Well, it's interesting. Ghosts, the aforementioned syphilis play, it had its premiere in Chicago. No respected Scandinavian theater would do it. And Ibsen was a crank. You see pictures of him, and he had these big white muttonchop dour. He made Beethoven look cuddly, if you've seen those busts.

So he was considered a little too edgy. The Scandinavian theaters didn't really like him. But towards the end of his life, people started to realize that he had really fundamentally changed what drama was going to be all about.

CATHY WURZER: Now, I mentioned in the introduction that he's mostly thought of as a playwright, but he had other talents.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: He wrote lots of poems. The poems are a little more abstruse, don't quite capture things quite as well as this play does. I was on the internet yesterday. He was a painter, a fair to middling watercolorist from what I can see.

And he was a world traveler. Norway loves to claim him. And it was in fact Norway that has proclaimed 2006 as the year of Ibsen. But he lived out of the country for like 30 years. And he wrote most of his plays in Rome, and Munich, and Dresden, and places like that.

CATHY WURZER: So where can folks get in on the local Ibsen hoopla, if you can--

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: Well, I think, hoopla-- let's put hoopla in quotation marks. This weekend at theater in the round in Minneapolis on the West Bank, they're closing a production of Ghosts, the aforementioned syphilis play.

Next weekend, Commonweal Theater kicks off its ninth annual Ibsen festival, Commonweal is a little theater down in Lanesboro, Minnesota, down by Rochester. But they are doing When We Dead Awaken, which was Ibsen's very last play. And they're doing music, and rosemaling classes, and all sorts of other Scandinavian stuff.

And then a couple of weeks, on February 16th, a professor from Duke University has come to talk at St. Olaf, of course, and at the University of Minnesota. And she's going to talk about Ibsen and the birth of modernism. And then no matter where you are in the world, you can see an Ibsen play, 130 every week, they say.

CATHY WURZER: 130 every week.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: 130 productions every week.

CATHY WURZER: So does he rival Shakespeare as one of the most performed playwrights in the world?

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: I think in terms of probably not quite so much, but I think there's Ibsen-- there's Shakespeare and then there's Ibsen who changed the theater in the same way that Shakespeare did.

CATHY WURZER: All right. Thanks.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: So get out there and see him.

CATHY WURZER: I will.

DOMINIC PAPATOLA: All right.

CATHY WURZER: All right. Dominic Papatola is Minnesota Public Radio arts commentator.

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CATHY WURZER: I was just laughing with Dominic Papatola off the air here about how yes, we had fun talking about Ibsen. And by the way, Dominic is with the St. Paul Pioneer Press. How about the forecast quickly here before we go off to the news. A very nice day, sunny skies. A wind advisory, though, for southwestern Minnesota. It's going to be warm. Highs today, 38 in Hibbing, about 49 or 50 in Worthington. It's 8:30.