HENRIK, AFTER IBSEN

“Want something badly enough... something answers. And sooner or later... it comes to collect.” - Halvard Solness

As tech founder Halvard Solness prepares to launch the most powerful system he has ever built, a young man, Henrik Wangel, arrives carrying a story from his past — and demanding that Solness fulfill a promise he says Solness made a decade earlier.

As Henrik’s arrival unsettles Solness’s understanding of his past – and his place in the future – he begins to question whether the fear that has governed him is a warning or something he must overcome.

Henrik, After Ibsen explores what happens when we begin surrendering human judgment to systems that promise answers, and when the people building those systems become convinced that the greater danger is not moving fast enough.

ARTIST STATEMENT

At the center of Ibsen’s The Master Builder is a man terrified of being replaced by a younger generation, even as he is driven to build higher, go further, and prove that he still belongs at the top. He also suspects that his deepest desires exert a mysterious force on the world around him.

That felt urgently contemporary.

Artificial intelligence is being built by people who speak openly about creating systems that may surpass human intelligence, transform entire professions, and eventually make even their creators less necessary. The fear at the heart of Ibsen’s play — that what comes next will replace you — is now embedded in the technology itself.

Henrik, After Ibsen uses Ibsen’s tragedy to explore the human impulses beneath that ambition: fear, guilt, desire, and our longing to escape uncertainty.

The play is less interested in whether artificial intelligence is good or bad than in what happens when we begin trusting systems to answer questions we once had to answer for ourselves – and for one another.