The Huntington Tackles Ibsen Classic
Theater company stages A Doll’s House for first time
Henrik Ibsen is considered one of the most influential playwrights of all time, frequently credited as “the father of modern drama.” The 19th-century Norwegian’s works are more frequently produced than any other playwright, except Shakespeare. So it may come as a surprise to learn that the Huntington Theatre Company has never mounted a production of A Doll’s House, the drama that propelled Ibsen to international stardom after its debut in 1879. The play, which challenges societal conventions about marriage, money, and equality between the sexes, caused an immediate sensation, ending as it does with a wife choosing to leave her husband and three young children to discover her genuine self.
Happily, the Huntington is finally addressing that oversight with a production featuring a new and acclaimed adaptation by prize-winning playwright Bryony Lavery. The play is directed by Huntington veteran Melia Bensusssen (Awake and Sing!, Luck of the Irish, Circle Mirror Transformation) and the set design is by James Noone, a College of Fine Arts associate professor of theater.
Ibsen said he was inspired to write A Doll’s House because he was convinced that “a woman cannot be herself in modern society,” since, at the time the play was written, it was “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.”
A Doll’s House charts the marriage of Nora and Torvald Helmer, who are happily married and raising three children. Torvald has just been promoted, and the family is preparing to enjoy the Christmas holidays as the play opens. But what Nora’s husband doesn’t know is that his wife had earlier risked her reputation to save his life. His awareness of what she did sets in motion a series of events that ultimately lead to Nora’s realization that she must strike out on her own.
Although it’s often described as a feminist play, Bensussen argues that A Doll’s House is much more.
“The puzzle of the play is what happens to this happy marriage,” she says. “Torvald and Nora are doing their best to love each other and make a go of it in a very capitalistic, very ambitious, very judgmental society.”
What struck Bensussen as she approached A Doll’s House (it’s her first time directing the play) is how contemporary the issues are and how much Ibsen’s words continue to reverberate with audiences, despite having been written nearly 150 years ago.
“The play is really speaking to how challenging it is to be one’s own person while making the compromises that relationships and society force you to make,” she says. “Everybody in the play is challenged to find their own sense of morality, their own sense of values, even—and especially—if they go against what society says is the right thing to do.”
Artistic director Peter DuBois says that various Ibsen titles had floated in and out of planning discussions since he took over eight years ago, but the time to produce A Doll’s House seemed especially right now.
“The new translation by Bryony Lavery is thrilling,” says DuBois. “We have so few opportunities to bring women’s voices to classic texts, let alone for an 890-seat house, and given the self-assured feminism that underlies the play, it seemed like the perfect time.”
The Huntington production is notable for its interracial casting of Andrea Syglowski—who won an Elliot Norton Award for her performance in the Huntington production of Venus in Fur in 2014—as Nora, and Sekou Laidlow, who is black, as Torvald. But Bensussen says the fact that one actor is white, the other black, is coincidental. “The intention wasn’t specifically to make an interracial marriage,” she says, “but to cast two vibrant actors. What I have done is assemble an extraordinarily strong cast of young American actors who have the passion and the ability to make this play feel contemporary and vibrant.…They are all gifted actors who are pretending they’re Norwegian, and none of them are.”
Syglowski says she began rehearsals with as few preconceived notions about Nora as possible, adding that she quickly discovered that her character “is whip smart, even if she doesn’t know it, has a strong moral center that is all her own, even if she doesn’t know it, is impulsive and sometimes flighty, a dreamer, a life force trapped inside the ideals of a woman in Norway at the turn of the 19th century.”
Asked how she approached a role that has been played on stage and screen by such famous actresses as Liv Ullman, Jane Fonda, Claire Bloom, and Janet McTeer, Syglowski says she began with what Ibsen himself tells the audience about Nora. “I pay attention to what the other characters say about her and what she says about herself. I look at what she does. How she thinks. I try to gather as much information as I can about the society she was living in, the rules of that society. And then I let my imagination do the rest.”
Noone, an award-winning Broadway set designer (his next project is a Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, with Glenn Close reprising her Tony Award–winning role), says that despite decades of experience, he had some trepidation about taking on a play that has been produced so frequently. The challenge, he says, was how to “take a story that everyone knows and find a fresh way of looking at it that allows the audience to hear the play again and walk away with a new perspective on it.”
For the Huntington production, Noone set out to create a consciously theatrical space “that allows the story to be revealed in a way that we’re not used to seeing.”
The designer has created a simple, child-like construction of a house that “is sort of a play place, a fantasy world for Torvald and Nora. They’re very much in love, they live in this sort of toy house, not a doll house, but a very childlike space.” Drawing on the paintings of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who was influenced by Ibsen, Noone has saturated the set with the kind of hot colors Munch favored, to create a suggestion of the kind of purgatory that Nora finds herself in as the play advances. “There’s a sort of scary, looming drop upstage with this house that, as the play goes on, becomes more apparent. I don’t want to give away what we do, but the whole space transforms.”
Bensussen says there is a reason A Doll’s House continues to be one of the most-produced plays across the globe. “It’s just so insightful about human nature. There’s so much empathy in this play, and there’s such a sense of the struggle to be human, the struggle to succeed. I think it’s extraordinary how one playwright, sitting with pen and paper, can craft this perfectly logical, emotionally sound, recognizable world that blows apart at the end, not unlike the way the Greek tragedies do.”
The Huntington Theatre Company’s production of A Doll’s House runs at the BU Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston, through February 5. Tickets range from $25 to $135 and can be purchased online, by phone at 617-266-0800, or in person at the BU Theatre box office. Patrons 35 and younger may purchase $30 tickets (ID required) for any production, and there is a $5 discount for seniors. Military personnel can purchase tickets for $20 with the promo code MILITARY, and students 25 and under can purchase tickets for $20. Members of the BU community get $10 off (ID required). Call 617-266-0800 for more information. Follow the Huntington Theatre Company on Twitter at @huntington.
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