Ibsen's 1879 play left audiences shocked. Now in Pasadena, the door opens to ‘A Doll's House, Part 2'

Los Angeles Times

20-05-2025

In 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' playwright Lucas Hnath cheekily proposes an answer to a question that has haunted the theater for more than a century: Whatever happened to Nora after she walked out on her marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 drama, 'A Doll's House'?
The door slam that concludes Ibsen's play ushered in a revolution in modern drama. After Nora's exit, anything was possible on the stages of respectable European playhouses. Conventional morality was no longer a choke hold on dramatic characters, who were allowed to set dangerous new precedents for audiences that may have been easily shocked but were by no means easily deterred.
'A Doll's House, Part 2,' which opened Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse under the direction of Jennifer Chang, is a sequel with a puckish difference. Although ostensibly set 15 years after Nora stormed out on Torvald and her three children, the play takes place in a theatrical present that has one antique-looking shoe in the late 19th century and one whimsical sneaker in the early 21st.
The hybrid nature of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' isn't just reflected in the costume design. The language of the play moves freely from the declamatory to the profane, with some of its funniest moments occurring when fury impels a character to unleash some naughty modern vernacular.
More crucially, comedy and tragedy are allowed to coexist as parallel realities. Hnath has constructed 'A Doll's House, Part 2' as a modern comedy of ideas, divided into a series of confrontations in which characters get to thrash out different perspectives on their shared history.
Chang stages the play like a courtroom drama, with a portion of the audience seated on the stage like a jury. The spare (if too dour) set by Wilson Chin, featuring the door that Nora made famous and a couple of rearranged chairs, allows for the brisk transit of testimony in a drama that lets all four characters have their say.
Nora (played with a touch too much comic affectation by Elizabeth Reaser) has become a successful author of controversial women's books espousing radical ideas about the trap of conventional marriage. She has returned to the scene of her domestic crime out of necessity.
Torvald (portrayed with compelling inwardness by Jason Butler Harner), her stolid former husband, never filed the divorce papers. She's now in legal jeopardy, having conducted business as an unmarried woman. And her militant feminist views have won her enemies who would like nothing more than to send her to prison.
Nora needs Torvald to do what he was supposed to have done years ago: officially end their marriage. But not knowing how he might react to her reemergence, she makes arrangements to strategize privately with Anne Marie (Kimberly Scott), the old nanny who raised Nora's children in her absence and isn't particularly inclined to do her any favors.
After Torvald and Anne Marie both refuse to cooperate with her, Nora has no choice but to turn to her daughter, Emmy (crisply played by Kahyun Kim). Recently engaged to a young banker, Emmy has chosen the road that her mother abandoned, a distressing realization for Nora, who had hoped that her example would have inaugurated a new era of possibility for women.
Hnath works out the puzzle of Nora's dilemma as though it were a dramatic Rubik's Cube. The play hasn't any ax to grind. If there's one prevailing truth, it's that relationships are murkier and messier than ideological arguments.
Nora restates why she left her marriage and explains as best she can the reasons she stayed away from her children all these years. But her actions, however necessary, left behind a tonnage of human wreckage. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' offers a complex moral accounting. As each character's forcefully held view is added to the ledger sheet, suspense builds over how the playwright will balance the books.
Each new production of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' works out the math in a slightly different way. The play had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2017 in an elegant production that was somewhat more somber than the Broadway production that opened shortly after and earned Laurie Metcalf a well-deserved Tony for her performance.
The play found its voice through the Broadway developmental process, and Metcalf's imprint is unmistakable in the rhythms of Nora's whirligig monologues and bracing retorts. Metcalf is the rare actor who can lunge after comedy without sacrificing the raw poignancy of her character.
Reaser adopts a humorous mode but it feels forced. More damagingly, it doesn't seem as if Hnath's Nora has evolved all that much from the skittishly coquettish wife of Ibsen's play. The intellectual arc of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' suffers from the mincing way Reaser introduces the character, with little conviction for Nora's feminist principles and only a superficial sense of the long, exhausting road of being born before your time.
The early moments with Scott's Anne Marie are unsteady. Reaser's Nora comes off as a shallow woman oblivious of her privilege, which is true but only partly so. Scott has a wonderful earthy quality, but I missed the impeccable timing of Jayne Houdyshell's Anne Marie, who could stop the show with an anachronistic F-bomb. Chang's staging initially seems like a work-in-progress.
The production is galvanized by the excellent performances of Harner and Kim. Harner reveals a Torvald changed by time and self-doubt. Years of solitude, sharpened by intimations of mortality, have cracked the banker's sense of certainty. He blames Nora for the hurt he'll never get over, but he doesn't want to go down as the paragon of bad husbands. He too would like a chance to redeem himself, even if (as Harner's canny performance illustrates) character is not infinitely malleable. Bad habits endure.
Kim's Emmy holds her own against Nora even as her proposed solution to her mother's dilemma involves some questionable ethics. Nora may be disappointed that her daughter is making such conformist choices, but Emmy sees no reason why the mother she never knew should feel entitled to shape her life. The brusquely controlled way Kim's Emmy speaks to Nora hints at the ocean of unresolved feelings between them.
The production is somewhat hampered by Anthony Tran's cumbersome costumes and Chin's grimly rational scenic design. Elizabeth Harper's lighting enlivens the dull palette, but I missed the surreal notes of the South Coast Repertory and Broadway stagings. Hnath creates his own universe, and the design choices should reflect this wonderland quality to a jauntier degree.
But Chang realizes the play's full power in the final scene between Nora and Torvald. Reaser poignantly plunges the depths of her character, as estranged husband and wife share what the last 15 years have been like for them.
'A Doll's House' was considered in its time to be politically incendiary. Hnath's sequel, without squelching the politics, picks up the forgotten human story of Ibsen's indelible classic.