Dahr Uncaged, Courtesy of the Feminist Ibsen

The struggle of women for recognition and equality seems as contemporary as the ERA but is, in truth, as old as gender itself, and Sappho, Boadicea and Joan of Arc. Down the decades the desires and the frustrations have been observed and enunciated by men as well as women.

In modern times, Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage” caught poignantly the tugs and pride of rising consciousness and the thrust to liberation. He had a Scandinavian predecessor, Henrik Ibsen, who, in his 19th-Century day, created a gallery of remarkable, vigorous women.

The Norwegian actress Juni (pronounced Yuni) Dahr was last in Los Angeles in 1988 doing a one-woman show called “Joan of Arc: Vision Through Fire.” The sense of her evening was to present Joan the real human being, with fears and doubts, rather than the myth or the saint.

Now Dahr has returned to Los Angeles for a one-time-only showcase performance (Monday night at the Westwood Playhouse) of a new show she has fashioned called “Ibsen Women: Put an Eagle in a Cage.” The subtitle is from Ibsen’s “Vikings of Helgeland,” and what the character, Hjordis, says in full is, “Put an eagle in a cage and it will bite the bars, whether they are of iron or gold.”

Ibsen’s women are frequently encaged, in some cases preferring death or flight to the ongoing entrapments. Dahr portrays Hjordis as one of the five Ibsen women in view. She is also Hilde in “The Master Builder,” Hedda in “Hedda Gabler,” Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” and Nora in “A Doll’s House.”

The idea for the Ibsen evening, Dahr says, arose while she was doing “Joan of Arc” in Los Angeles. She developed it while in residence at NYU under a Fulbright grant and another from the Norwegian government. It was first performed in 1989 at an international Ibsen symposium at Yale and has since been seen in New York, at Stratford-on-Avon in England, in Rome, throughout Scandinavia and in San Francisco last week.

“Why is Ibsen so actual today?” Dahr asks in a kind of unabating wonder. “He taught me what it is to be a woman today, what it is to be free. He writes about what it is to be engaged not only with society but within yourself. He sees what is freedom, even within relationships.”

Dahr talks with audiences after the performances and says that men respond to the material as well as women. “They want to talk to me about their marriages and their relationships,” she says.

“Ibsen once said that if you want to know him, you must know Norway. I change it. I think if you want to know Norway you must know Ibsen. The Norwegian soul has a dark side and a light side.”

Dahr is from Oslo, and acting appealed to her early on. “The child inside you wants to search, explore, to see rooms I don’t know about, people I haven’t met.” But she was also shy as a child and deferred the acting. She spent a year in the mountains in the ecologically aware ‘70s, worrying about nature, survival, our separation from our roots. But in the end she went to the national dramatic school in Oslo, then spent a dozen years in repertory at the National Theater in Bergen.

Norwegian television filmed her “Joan of Arc.” “I’d only done it mostly in churches and ruins, and I couldn’t do it on a stage. So we took a crew and went to an island in the far north, a tiny place with ruins, 4,000 people and 8 million birds. The people had never seen theater.”

Earlier she had spent a year in Poland, studying at Grotowski’s avant-garde Theatre Laboratory, where she mastered enough of the language to be able to act. She and her sister Eva have formed a film production company and made a prize-winning short called “Dolce Vita,” which was shown at the Women in Film festival here. They now have in post-production a feature called “Troll,” from a story by the Norwegian writer Jonas Lie. It is not, she says, about the cute figures of folklore but rather about the demons within us.

For information about Dahr’s Monday night performance, call (213) 208-5454.