Reworking of Ibsen's classic uses 3 actors to play over 40 characters and transports the viewer from a hillside in Norway to the sands before the Sphinx of Gizeh to an insane asylum in Cairo.

A rebel is trapped between the Renaissance spirit of man as god and the Modern myth of the Individual, Peer Gynt abandons everything in life but the quest for "the Self". Seeking pleasure and adventure above all else, without accepting responsibility for his actions, he struggles with his desire and his distaste for woman, his completion.

Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune August 10, 1997

?Actual openings are slim in number late in August, so it might not be a bad time to be adventurous and check out the odder, more offbeat fare. One such enterprise is a new, storefront version of Henrik Iben?s ambitious ?Peer Gynt,? brought to twon by a roving troupe, Breadline Theatre Group, who say they plan to make Chicago home beginning with this project. ? Chicago Sun Times

?...Michael Oswalt directs a trio of Breadline actors, and together they've done a good job at trimming the sprawling script to under two hours without disrupting its chronology. Paul Kampf is the super-serious Peer. Kirk Anderson plays all the other male roles and is especially good as Death's messenger, the Button Molder. There is a strong argument for casting one actress as all of the women in Peer's life - his long-suffering mother, his childhood love, Ingrid, and Solveig, the distant figure who is, literally, his salvation. Ellen Fairey shrieks too much in most of these parts, but movingly captures Solveig's otherworldliness. An effective physical environment, complete with punk music, for this ever-changing play" Lawrence Bommer, Chicago Reader August 22, 1997

?Henrik Ibsen's 1867 verse play depicts the anguished title character, a Norwegian folk figure, as a charming louse. Bit by bit Peer loses his soul as he abandons his mother, ignores his beloved Solveig, and travels the world to make his fortune. But significantly Ibsen denies this overreacher the noble ambitions of a Faust: Peer is merely an amoral, misogynistic hedonist, mediocre even in his sins, who sacrifices all to his quest for "the Self," living so entirely for himself that his soul shrinks into scrap.

Leaving Bloomington, Illinois, to make its Chicago debut, the Breadline Theatre Group has condensed Ibsen's lengthy saga, just as the Chicago Actors Ensemble did in 1995 with its two-person Interface (Peer/Gynt). Here three actors play 40 characters, creating many moving stage pictures for Dan Thompson's frenetically shifting lighting and Chris Connelly's alternately supple and rock-hard musical backdrop. But though much in Michael Oswalt's solemn, dedicated staging is visually haunting, much also misfires; this cryptic, too severe adaptation succumbs to bad acoustics and worse vocal projection, a lack of range among the roles, and an elegiac tone that makes Peer's story seem one long loss. Paul Kampf's Peer seems to struggle against nothing but his lines, while Ellen Fairey makes the women one-note saints or whores. Only Kirk Anderson's voice and face are as evocative as Susan Hayes's costumes.?