Mia Christou and Lisa Robins (Photo by Joshua M. Shelton)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Beverly Hills Playhouse
Through Dec. 8
RECOMMENDED
A Doll’s House, Part 2, Lucas Hnath’s brilliant 2017 play, picks up the fortunes of Nora and Torvald Helmer, the embattled married couple from Henrik Ibsen’s famous drama, A Doll’s House, some 15 years after Nora famously exits her marriage. Directed by Allen Barton, the second installment in The Doll’s House Project is being presented at the Beverly Hill Playhouse in tandem with the original.
The cultural significance of Ibsen’s 1879 drama cannot be overstated. When the outwardly happy but inwardly repressed Nora realizes that her marriage to Torvald has been a sham, she leaves her husband and children with the “door slam heard round the world.”
Nora’s defection is triggered by a complicated series of events that revolve around her forgery on a promissory note. Never realizing the criminal implications of her actions, she has borrowed the money in order to whisk her gravely ill husband off to Italy to recover his health. Now, a moneylender in desperate circumstances threatens blackmail
The plot of Part 2 also revolves around Nora’s unwitting forgery and imminent disgrace. For the past 15 years, she has wrongly assumed that Torvald had divorced her — only to learn that he’d never filed the necessary paperwork to legally dissolve their union.
In the interim, Nora has become a wealthy and highly controversial feminist writer, living her life solo — and encouraging other unhappy women to flee their marriages and do likewise. But signing contracts without her husband’s approval still constitutes fraud. Not only could she lose her reputation and her livelihood over this — she could also be put behind bars.
Now, she has returned to get Torvald to finally sign the divorce papers. Yet even though he himself faces disgrace for fostering his community’s commonly held misperception that Nora is long dead, he balks.
Directed by Mia Christou, Ibsen’s 19th century serves as a handy preface for Part 2 (despite the problems inherent in this adaptation by herself and Barton). Yet Christou’s checkered staging keeps us at an emotional distance from its characters, who come off as stock — particularly Torvald, who lacks any power of psychological introspection. Granted, that’s partly due to the conventions of Ibsen’s day, before Freudianism and the “Method” revolutionized theatrical models — but it registers as a deficit nonetheless.
That deficit is beautifully redressed in Part 2. In a series of richly realized dialectics, Hnath evens the balance between Nora and Torvald, each of whom must finally confront their intentions and motives. Neither are wholly good nor wholly evil — but simply, fallibly human.
In Part 2, Christou plays Nora. So boldly mannered it borders on caricature, her portrayal is underpinned by a stringent subtlety. Yet she doesn’t skimp on the humor beneath Nora’s initially unbending ideologue, expressing her violently anti-marriage views in a hilariously lengthy diatribe that Christou delivers to a turn.
Part 2’s running time is almost the same as the laboriously paced A Doll’s House, but we are so swept up in Barton’s near-flawless staging that we don’t feel its passage. Barton frequently has his actors face full front to deliver their lines instead of looking into one another’s eyes. It’s a risky but here perfectly realized device that not only emphasizes the psychological divide between the characters but focuses on their facial responses and emotionalism.
Christou is the production’s lynchpin but a superlative cast is well up to the standard she sets. Peter Zizzo is virtuosic as the sadly “broken” Torvald, unable to move on from his marital betrayal, while a wonderful Lisa Robins, sporting a mop of wildly unkempt hair, is drolly matter-of-fact as Nora’s former nanny Anne-Marie, who stayed behind to raise Nora’s children. As Emmy, Nora’s daughter, who rankles under her mother’s manipulativeness, Tati Jorio could have been dwarfed by the savvy veterans around her but holds her own.
In a final observation, Nora enthuses that in just 20 or 30 years, her dream of a free society, where women are no longer subject to the “bad rules” that have previously constrained them, will finally be realized. Some 150 years later, with our retrospective knowledge of the oppression still suffered by women worldwide, it’s an almost unbearably poignant moment — a stark reminder of how far we have come and, sadly, how much ground we have lost.
Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills. Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 7:30 pm; thru Dec. 8. (310) 620-1134. www.bhplayhouse.com Running time: two hours and 45 minutes with an intermission.
