Believe it or not, I have never had the chance to see an Ibsen play live. The last time someone local did one, we had small kids and it just didn’t work out with our schedule. These days, now that the kids either can take care of themselves or want to come see plays themselves, it is a lot easier. Despite not seeing a live production, I have read a few. Back in the day, I read the very bizarre Peer Gynt, because of the music, of course. Since starting this blog, I have read two more, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People.
Each of our local theaters seems to have its own niche. Stars Playhouse is affiliated with Stars Dinner Theater, which focuses on classic musicals, but has taken a more serious art-oriented direction under the leadership of artistic director John Spitzer. This has included creative productions of classic drama, such as the trio of Thornton Wilder plays last fall. In this case, the classic Ibsen masterpiece, A Doll’s House, was paired with a modern continuation of the story, A Doll’s House Part 2, by Lucas Hnath. For a mere five bucks extra, one could see both plays back to back, with snacks and a chance to chat with the actors after each play. It was a great value and a lot of fun. (Special mention of the extended conversations with Karl Wade and Sara Gervais after the first show.)
The casts of the two shows were different, even though the characters carried over, so it was interesting to see the different approaches.
A Doll’s House is at least familiar to most theatergoers and literary sorts. It is widely considered to be Ibsen’s masterpiece, a proto-feminist work, and one of the most shocking plays of its time. I mean, in 1879, a woman walking out on her family? And not being explicitly punished for it? And the audience invited to empathize with her too?
Nora and Torvald are a youngish married couple. Torvald has just received a promotion at the bank, and will finally have enough income to allow the family to relax a bit and enjoy themselves. However, there is a secret that threatens to undermine the happiness. Several years back, Torvald was deathly ill (it is implied that he has tuberculosis), and in order to cure him, he has to take an extended trip to a better climate (in this case Italy.) But who has the money to just spend a year away from home?
In order to make this happen, Nora lies to her husband, claiming that she inherited a sum from her late father. The truth is, Nora has been cruelly disinherited, and has turned to a moneylender to raise the funds. The problem is, at the time (and indeed well into the 1970s!) a woman could not borrow money on her own. So, Nora forges the signature of her father, which is discovered because she accidentally used a date just after his death.
The moneylender, Krogstead, is the villain of the play, although he is more complicated than that, as we come to understand by the end. Krogstead has had hard times, and, like Nora, got caught forging a signature. This ruined his reputation, and he has only recently been able to rebuild some small degree of respectability through his competent work at the bank. This is now threatened, because Torvald decides to fire Krogstead, because they used to be friends and Torvald doesn’t want to have the appearance of nepotism. Krogstead threatens to reveal Nora’s forgery to Torvald unless he retains his job. Nora tries, but Torvald blows her off.
Things are further complicated by the fact that Nora’s old friend, Mrs. Linde, has been recently widowed without a cent, and needs a job. Torvald intends to give Krogstead’s job to Linde. Oh, and it turns out that Krogstead and Linde used to be flames, but Linde threw him over in favor of a man with money (although he later lost it) because she had to support her dying mother and young brothers.
If this weren’t enough, the wealthy doctor Rank, neighbor and friend to Torvald and Nora, is secretly in love with Nora, and not so secretly dying of a terminal disease. Because of Victorian sensibilities, Ibsen cannot simply name the disease, instead using euphemisms about bone softening and so on, but he likely means congenital syphilis, the same disease that makes an appearance in Ghosts. This is why Rank blames his philandering father for his untimely demise.
The two other characters in this version of the play are the servants, Helene the maid, and Anne-Marie, the governess. Anne-Marie has her own fascinating backstory: she gave up her illegitimate child for adoption, and became the wet-nurse and mother figure to the infant Nora. So their relationship isn’t merely one of hired help, but of family. In the original version, Nora’s children are on stage, with minor speaking lines. In the modern translation used here (by Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey and Kristen Brandt) they remain off stage.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say what happens over the course of the play. Krogstead follows through on his threat and sends Torvald a letter revealing Nora’s forgery. Torvald goes all nasty and misogynist on Nora, not even considering that Nora has saved his life with the money. And then, when Krogstead, under the influence of Linde, retracts the blackmail threat, “forgives” Nora in the most condescending way possible.
Nora, realizing that her husband looks on her as a child, as a doll, as an accessory, walks out the door, in one of the most iconic endings in theater.
As is usual in Ibsen, all of the main characters are complex. There are no innocents, no pure victims, no utter villains. Torvald, to be sure, is a prick. But he isn’t intentionally cruel, just a typical man of his time. Ibsen’s innovation is to take someone who is a pillar of the community, and a loving husband by the standards of the day, and reveal the condescension and sense of superiority that is literally praised by more conventional Victorians. (Dickens is merely one offender of many.)
Nora is hardly an innocent victim, however. She is manipulative, shallow, feckless, and materialistic. And oh so entitled and privileged. The way she treats Linde is pretty appalling, even if it is mostly accidental. It is hard to disagree with her decision to walk out after what Torvald says to her, but she has certainly done her best to confirm his low view of female character. I found it interesting that my wife had a visceral dislike of Nora, while I had the same response to Torvald. Both of us are happy to be married to each other to say the least, but we also are glad we are not like the characters of our own gender.
Krogstead also turns out to be more complicated than he appears. I noted above, it was great to talk to Karl Wade about his character (and also about our mutual drama production, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor) and its interpretation. There is the problem inherent in drama (and opera) of sudden transformations. Characters have to fall in love during the course of a single aria. And, in this case, Krogstead has to become human through his love of Linde. There are some further complexities, too. Krogstead has taken a significant risk lending money to a woman. Since Nora clearly has been disinherited by her father, he has had to rely on her secreting away money meant for her own clothing in order to pay him back. He has sat on his knowledge of the forgery for years by this time. Is this the behavior of a true villain? He only resorts to blackmail when he is on the verge of losing his job, and the hard-won respectability that years of good behavior have only barely gained him.
There are so many things I love about the play. The interaction between Nora and Linde reveals how easy it is to fail to understand what privilege looks like…unless you lack that privilege. Doctor Rank’s hilarious failure in his attempted seduction of Nora is so awkward yet so true to life. The complexities of Krogstead and Anne-Marie that are slowly revealed. The way Ibsen subtly reminds the audience of just how trapped women were by the unjust laws of his day.
Perhaps my favorite thing about Ibsen’s writing is how very little is ever said out loud. The dialogues are revealing more for what they do not and cannot say, than for the actual words said. Characters cannot truly articulate what they feel and what they intend, so it is what is between the lines that matters. (Hence the need for good acting to convey what is going on. And the acting was outstanding.) I’m pretty decent at figuring out what Ibsen means when reading his plays, but it was a far richer experience to see one acted out.
I should mention a few things from the final scene, because it is so powerful. Torvald goes wrong in many ways and throughout the play, but his most fatal mistake is when he expresses how wonderful it is to “forgive” Nora. It makes him “love” her even more because it reminds him of how dependent she is and how much like a child (and thus not an equal.) It is a “love” borne not out of respect, but out of a sense of superiority. He loves her like one loves an infant, or a dog, not an equal adult. And thus, as Nora tells him, he doesn’t love her: he merely loves himself.
The other astonishingly great line comes earlier, before Krogstead withdraws his blackmail. Torvald opines that a man will sacrifice a lot for a woman, but he cannot sacrifice his honor. Nora replies that there are hundreds of thousands of women who have done just that for a man - and are expected to do so by society. This is, unfortunately, still true in our culture.
One of the benefits of talking with the cast about the play is that we got to talk about about the artistic decisions. One I thought was interesting - and praiseworthy - was to eschew the common technique of making Torvald and Nora cold and distant to each other. Instead, John Spitzer and Cody Ganger played the couple as one that has strong sexual and romantic chemistry, which is then ruined by the discovery of the lack of respect and equality. This makes the ending more devastating. It wasn’t a sigh of relief that these obviously unhappy people finally split up, but the eviscerating destruction of a relationship that could have been great.
Spitzer and Ganger are two of my favorite local actors, and have been fixtures in local theater and education for years. (Cody and her husband Kevin played the central couple in what is still my favorite version of The Taming of the Shrew - their chemistry took the sting out of the otherwise sexist plot.) The acting in this one, particularly by Ganger, was intense and physical. She must have been exhausted by the end. This was professional work, and I was impressed by both of them.
I already mentioned Karl Wade as Krogstead - another fine performance, and more believable than I expected given the text of the play. Sara Gervais as Linde played well off of both Nora and Krogstead. She also did the costumes, which made for a fascinating discussion of the choices after the play. Jordan Fulmer got another turn in a role other than the villain, and it was nice to see him take a turn as a complex character that required a light and subtle touch. Rounding out the cast were two theater regulars, Janice Bondurant as Anne-Marie, and Shelbe McClain as Helene. Props to McClain for good physical acting in a part with few lines, and Bondurant for stepping in late in the production - she was the third actor cast in the part.
Overall, A Doll’s House was well done, and I thought it very moving.
I wasn’t quite as impressed with A Doll’s House Part 2, but I want to be clear that this is due to the script, not the acting or staging.
My wife put her finger on the most obvious flaw of Lucas Hnath’s continuation of the story. While Ibsen left so much between the lines, Hnath has the characters say everything out loud. And I mean everything. Thus, the dialogue often felt like some combination of a preachy feminist screed and a marital therapy session. (And not one that was going well - good lord the characters had problems, even fifteen years later.) One could say that this is the difference between a late 19th Century way of writing and an early 21 Century version. But I think that is an oversimplification. The characters themselves got into trouble in the first play in part because they couldn’t talk openly. It seemed unlikely that suddenly, after a mere fifteen years of being apart, they would now get into trouble because of oversharing. For two introverts like my wife and I, this emotionally intense oversharing and nasty recrimination was exhausting and a bit traumatic. The characters all needed therapy, and we weren’t up for the task of giving it to them.
Apparently, Hnath conceived of the play as a series of boxing matches, each between two characters. This matches the original play in its use of almost exclusively two-person scenes. So, fifteen years later, you have Nora sparring with Anne-Marie (who ended up raising Nora’s kids, of course), Nora sparring with Torvald, Nora sparring with her daughter Emmy, Anne-Marie versus Emmy, and Emmy versus Torvald. I think that about covers it.
Some of the individual moments were pretty good. As a lawyer, I particularly appreciated the fact that Hnath actually got the legal issues correct. This is too rare in movies, television, and the stage. The central plot of the play is that Torvald was supposed to have divorced Nora, he didn’t, and instead let people think she was dead. And now, someone is blackmailing Nora about it.
Here is how the legal issues break down: In order to get a divorce back then, Nora would have had to prove that Torvald was guilty of extreme cruelty, or a lack of financial support. So, he could have been sleeping around on her, beating her, emotionally abusing her, and she could not have gotten a divorce. As long as he was offering her financial support (he did), and wasn’t far worse than an average abusive husband, she was stuck. Which meant she couldn’t sign contracts, take out loans, earn her own money, or anything else that men could unquestionably do.
In contrast, Torvald could get a divorce pretty much for the asking. She walked out, so she abandoned him. She slept with other men, so he could jettison her for adultery. The only reason this gets complex for Torvald is that he has, through lazy inaction, allowed people to believe Nora is dead. By filing for divorce, he would be admitting he tacitly lied, and this would harm his reputation.
Emmy proposes an alternative: her buddy down at the clerk’s office can forge a death certificate for Nora, and then she can just change her name and move on. Nora rejects this idea of fraud, which leaves no obvious solution. (And in the end, everyone is unhappy.)
I also liked the use of a chess board during the play. Because the sparring is essentially a game - a serious game with serious consequences - but nonetheless a game, the characters casually did things to the chess board. Emmy, who never really knew her mother, knocks the white queen over, signaling that she considers her mother deposed. Nora turns the board 90 degrees, putting the white and black pieces equally toward the stage. Anne-Marie turns it back so white faces the stage.
I mentioned that the actors were different in the second play. Bethany Rowlee, another fixture of local theater, played Nora. Because of various circumstances (we weren’t privy to all of them, but Covid has wreaked havoc on local productions, which are trying to keep people safe), she and Matthew Borton (as Torvald) had to fill in late in the game, and were unable to memorize the entire script. Rowlee’s subtle use of a printed script was mostly seamless. Borton had some moments where the seams showed a good bit. I suspect he had less time to prepare, and I have nothing but respect for anyone in that position.
There were some acting and speaking traits that the actors tried to carry across the two plays, and I recognized a few. That said, there were some differences. Nora, for obvious reasons, is more confident and less emotionally vulnerable in the second play. Fifteen years on one’s own tends to do that. Torvald is less warm, more bitter, and less likeable. Anne-Marie has a far bigger role in the second play, and I thought Karin Harmon did a great job of making it seem like she and Janice Bondurant were the same character. She also brought a lot of believable emotion to the part. Cheyenne Reyes rounded out the cast with the one new character, Emmy, who feels more modern than any of the others. The younger generation is clearly different, as it was in real life. (The late Victorians gave birth to the Flappers, after all.)
I think I will close with what I believe ties the two plays together more than anything else. In both, the characters are bounded by unjust laws and imprisoned by a sexist culture. When Nora walks out at the end of A Doll’s House, she has chosen to violate the laws and go against the rules of culture. Ibsen doesn’t really tell us what happens to her, but we can potentially figure it out from the real-life person he based Nora on. (See below.)
By the time of A Doll’s House Part 2, Nora has succeeded in making her own life as a writer, but realizes that her own success still hasn’t completely changed society - she will have to keep fighting for change.
Both plays draw on real life. Ibsen’s friend, Laura Kieler, a writer, was the basis for Nora. Like Nora, she needed money to pay for her husband’s tuberculosis treatment. She asked Ibsen to promote her book, but he refused, thinking it would look bad. She then forged a signature to get the money, her marriage blew up like in the play, and she left. Her husband then divorced her and had her committed to a mental hospital. Ibsen was shaken by the whole thing, and wrote the play during her commitment. Later, she returned to her husband, but also went on to have a reasonably successful career as a writer. She never forgave Ibsen for using her story, and was frustrated that her reputation was more “Ibsen’s Nora” rather than for her own writing success.
So, unjust laws harmed her, and the sexist culture relegated her to “inspiration for a man” rather than acknowledge her accomplishments.
Hnath also makes another interesting parallel. Nora has written her life’s story and made a tidy profit. Torvald is furious and feels betrayed, because his dirty laundry is now on display. This is a gender-flipped version of Ibsen profiting off of Laura’s story. Which is interesting enough. But it also raises the question of who owns a story. (This was, in my opinion, the best part of the play.) A problem that all of us who write face is that our stories are never just about us. When we tell our own stories (like I often do on this blog), we also tell the stories of others, particularly family. We tell our perspective on events, and that perspective often conflicts with the perspectives of the other participants in the story. For me personally, because I tell the stories of my experience in a cult, I have to tell the truth as I see it. Which includes some things that do not reflect that well on my parents and others of their generation. Nora cannot possibly tell her story without Torvald being portrayed in a negative light, for the simple reason that he has said and done things that negatively impacted Nora. Had she either omitted Torvald or limited herself to saying nice things about him, the story would have been fundamentally untrue at its most basic level.
Likewise, for me to omit my parents from my story would be dishonest, and render my story both meaningless and even unintelligible. That I was dragged into a cult over my objection in my late teens is a fact. That I was required to give up my chance at a normal higher education is a fact. That I made the best of the one option I had - law school - is true, but it doesn’t change the unpleasant reality of how I ended up where I did. Likewise, I cannot tell the story of my adult life, as a husband and father, without telling the truth about the way my mother treated my wife. My story includes other people, but at the end of the day, it is my story - and they do not own it. It is a tough pill to swallow that one is not the hero in everyone else’s story.
So, in the end, Nora is spot-on when she castigates Torvald for trying to take her story and make it about him. She does not “owe” him the protection of his reputation. She does not “owe” him or anyone else the careful preservation of unjust gender rules. His fantasy of magnanimously “forgiving” his wife and maintaining that superiority has crumbled, and she has no obligation to coddle his ego. Which is ultimately what Nora’s dramatic exit out that door in the first play meant.
Major props to Stars Playhouse for an excellent and thoughtful production.
I was similarly underwhelmed by A Doll House Part 2. It had gotten such great reviews when it was on Broadway that I expected more when I saw it at Berkeley Rep. I've seen a couple of Hnath's other plays on Broadway, Hillary and Clinton and Dana H. Dana H is the only one that really impressed me. Enough so that I will see it again next month in Berkeley. Interestingly, it is the one that is least scripted by him. He could only have written the stage directions. So, maybe your wife is correct about the dialogue.
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