Theater: John Golden Theatre / 252 West 45th Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Laurie Metcalf stars in Lucas Hnath's sequel to Ibsen's classic.
In the final scene of Ibsen's 1879 ground-breaking masterwork, Nora Helmer makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event—when Nora slams the door on everything in her life — instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, many years have passed since Nora’s exit. Now, there’s a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind?
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A door that was once slammed so hard that the noise could be heard around the world is now being knocked upon, most insistently. In the opening moments of Lucas Hnath’s smart, funny and utterly engrossing new play, which opened Thursday night at the Golden Theater, audience members laugh at the sound of the demanding tattoo being beaten upon that door.
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It’s apparently never too late to create a sequel — even to a Norwegian domestic drama written more than a century ago. Lucas Hnath, who had two of his plays (“The Christians,” “Red Speedo”) produced last year by major off-Broadway companies to great acclaim, now makes his Broadway debut with the lightweight but feisty comedy “A Doll’s House, Part 2.” This marks the play’s New York debut following a world premiere just last month on the West Coast.
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With Lucas Hnath’s lucid and absorbing A Doll’s House, Part 2, the Broadway season goes out with a bang. It is not the same kind of bang, mind you, that ended Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 social drama, A Doll’s House, in which bourgeois Norwegian wife Nora Helming walked out on her doting husband and young children with a decisive (and divisive) slam of the door. In Hnath’s taut sequel, set 15 years later, the runaway bride—played by the great Laurie Metcalf, with magnificent grit and frustration—returns to confront the people she left behind: her husband, Torvald (a sympathetic Chris Cooper); her now-grown daughter, Emmy (Condola Rashad, poised and glinting); and the family servant, Anne Marie (the uncommonly sensible Jayne Houdyshell).
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You wouldn’t think that a continuation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House — a groundbreaking, 1879 feminist drama about a wife who leaves an unhappy marriage to find herself — would be funny, but humor abounds in playwright Lucas Hnath’s creative sequel. Directed by Sam Gold, A Doll’s House, Part 2 imagines what would happen if, 15 years later, Ibsen’s Nora were to walk back through the door she exited at the close of his third act. At the time, Ibsen’s decision to have his protagonist abdicate her marital and familial responsibilities in favor of self-discovery and personal happiness was a shocking one, seen as a threat to the institution of marriage as a whole; Hnath’s script supposes that the fictional Nora has been confronted with similar accusations as her creator, and deals with them in head-on, often gleeful fashion.
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The whereabouts of Nora Helmer have been imagined, debated and even dramatized since 1879, when she shocked the Victorian world by slamming the door on her ostensibly happy marriage in Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” No less than Harold Prince directed a musical sequel, “A Doll’s Life,” which lasted five performances on Broadway in 1982.
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