SEQUEL BURSTING WITH WIT AND FEMALE FURY
A Doll’s House 2 proves it’s never too late to revisit great characters
It’s generally agreed that when Nora Helmer slams the door on her sham marriage, it closes Ibsen’s 1879 classic A Doll’s House on a resounding note of finality. Playwright Lucas Hnath would beg to differ, and he’s done so not by having a quiet word, but by writing a mischievous sequel. Nora is back, and this time she’s … well, exactly why is she back? Keeping us guessing is part of the fun of A Doll’s House, Part 2 (playing at Segal to Dec. 9). Hnath’s multi-Tony-nominated 2017 Broadway hit wittily begins with an insistent knocking on that famous door and ushers in all manner of complications that everybody thought had been conclusively settled 15 years earlier. Caitlin Murphy, making her debut, confidently and inventively directs the quartet of actors — Sarah Constible as Nora, Oliver Becker as abandoned husband Torvald, Ellie Moon as now grown-up daughter Emmy, and Victoria Barkoff as aging family nurse Anne-Marie. She makes use of a surprising amount of physicality, given the predominance of debates on the nature of love, marriage, loyalty and betrayal. Pierre-Étienne Locas’s set is a surreal wonder, a vast trapezoid-like space with bare floorboards, stripped of furniture except for two wooden chairs. Its dreamlike atmosphere is weirdly enhanced by the homely touch of outsize-patterned wallpaper. As for that famous door, it’s represented by an ominously angled aperture, though an actual physical door might have made Nora’s knocking more of an effective intro. But is there more to the play than an extended theatre geek’s knock-knock joke? A couple of brilliant opening scenes — the first seeing Nora tease the chirpily hostile Anne-Marie, the second being the much-anticipated confrontation with Torvald — persuade that the praise heaped on Hnath’s play has been well deserved. Worryingly, the pace begins to slacken thereafter, and I began to wonder whether this was all a bit of a drama school sketch after all, one that tries to keep things trundling along with circular arguments and incongruously modern idioms and cussing. The heretical thought even occurred that it might have worked better if Hnath had gone full-on Ibsen spoof and thrown in some mountain trolls, fogbound fiords and syphilitic artists moaning about the sins of the fathers (as it happens, Hnath is sparing with the Ibsenisms and doesn’t refer to the original so much that you need to prepare yourself with a dog-eared copy). Thankfully, things pick up considerably when Nora, her options for moving on with her life rapidly diminishing, is forced to finally sit down with the daughter she knew only as a toddler. Emmy, as played by Moon, is initially a scarily smiling oddball, strikingly dressed by costume designer Louise Bourret in a strangulating high-neck number with bizarre bubbly frou-frous. But the play really begins to show its heart and soul as Emmy unexpectedly expresses her needs. Things just keep getting better and better until a climax arrives that has to be seen to be believed in its wild eccentricity. Perhaps in a nod to the original’s famous tarantella, the production has a furious Nora and Torvald engaging in what looks like a flamenco-style bullfight. It’s a measure of the risks that Murphy and her cast have taken that the production often teeters on the edge of grotesquerie but never topples over. (Hnath’s script leaves it up to individual productions how they choose to fill the many silences between characters.) Constible, especially, displays wonderful comic timing, employing expansive gestures and zesty physicality to express her shock at how much has changed and how much has stayed the same on the other side of that door. A knockout production, one might say.