Back in the ‘Doll’s House’
Sept. 6; opens Sept. 13; and runs through Oct. 21 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Fifteen years after fleeing, at the outset of Hnath’s play, Nora (played by Mary Beth Fisher) has returned. It’s an unexpected astonishment for her aging husband, Torvald ( John Judd); her now-young-adult daughter, Emmy (Nikki Massoud); and the Helmer family’s longtime nanny and housemaid, Anne Marie (Nancy E. Carroll).
Even more surprising — or not, depending on one’s notion of what might have become of Nora in 19th century Norway — is her successful career as a writer of “books about women,” including a seemingly autobiographical one. She’s come back for reasons, ingeniously laid out by the playwright, that measure both the distance Nora has traveled, literally and psychologically, and the social limitations that still constrain her.
Hnath (pronounced nayth) thought he was just doing some private exploration when he found a “clunky” translation of Ibsen’s play online and did a line-by-line rewrite of his own. “I didn’t think much about where this might be going,” he said recently by phone from New York. “You can get intimidated when you start thinking about putting something out in the world.”
But when he did undertake a “Doll’s House” play, on a commission from Orange County’s South Coast Repertory, Hnath said the idea of updating a classic wasn’t daunting. “I was not trying to convince people this is the unwritten sequel. This play separates itself from Ibsen in several ways.”
One of them is the reduction from an original cast of nine to just four characters. The 90minute “Doll’s 2” plays out in five two-character scenes that Hnath labeled “individual boxing matches.” And then there’s his use of modern-day, at times obscenity-studded language. In his lean but suggestively expansive script, the playwright invites audiences to consider how “the Ibsen play is about its time and how it communicates with the present. It’s about how much has changed,” Hnath said, “and how much hasn’t.”
After premiering at South Coast in 2016, “A Doll’s House, Part 2” opened in April 2017 on Broadway, where it earned eight Tony nominations. (Laurie Metcalf won as best actress for her performance as Nora.) The play is now making the regional theater circuit. The Berkeley staging, under Les Waters’ direction, is a co-production with Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company.
A 39-year-old Orlando native, Hnath cites both the “theatricality” of nearby Disney World and the seminary classes his mother, now an ordained minister in an evangelical church, took when Hnath was in middle school. “I went along sometimes and sat next to her,” he recalled. “The seminary she attended was very involved in different translations of the Bible. There was something compelling to me about interpreting a text in different contexts.”
Hnath considered the ministry for a while, but went off to New York University on a premed tack. An essay-writing teacher’s encouragement helped persuade him to transfer to the school’s department of dramatic writing. He never looked back. The prolific Hnath’s works include the widely mounted “Red Speedo,” “The Christians” (about a schism in a megachurch), and plays about the Clintons, Isaac Newton and Walt Disney.
Hnath thinks he “probably” read “A Doll’s House” in high school. An avant-garde production he saw in New York demonstrated that “the story really held up, even with all the disruptive stuff they threw on top of it.” He’s since seen the play numerous times.
“Ibsen is a master of suspense,” Hnath said. “His plays have a kind of clockwork precision. The characters, if you really listen to them, have compelling reasons for why they think what they think. They’re all trying to make their cases as strongly as they can.”
That tension of balanced, vying interests, which “Doll 2” enacts in its verbal “boxing matches,” is essential Hnath. “I often think of my plays as being public trials,” he said.
The stakes in his Ibsen sequel are both substantial and timeless, worked out “in the spaces,” he said, “where things between men and women are not equal and nobody’s calling it out. The more invisible those imbalances of rights and power are, the more important it is to voice them.”