Latest news with #ADoll'sHouse
The Citizen
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Amato's ‘Doll's House 2' asks tough questions
Rubin called the play a gloves-off debate, both personal and political. Imagine walking out on your husband, three children and a society that thinks it knows better than you do, only to return 15 years later and find the door still open but nothing else quite the same. Theatre on The Square puts this notion forward in a new production A Doll's House 2 A Doll's House 2 picks up the story where the first play left off. The first instalment, A Doll's House, looked at the fate of main character Nora Helmer as a married woman. There were no real opportunities for her to gain any kind of self-fulfilment in a male dominated world. In short, it was probably the world's first feminist play, written by Norwegian playwright Hendik Ibsen and first performed in 1879. Back then, the idea of a woman abandoning her family to find herself was unthinkable. The final moment of that play, a single door closing behind Nora, echoed far beyond the theatre. It was not just scandalous; it caused quite a stir and has been doing so for well over a century and a half. In fact, in 2006 it was one of the world's most performed plays. Everyone wanted to know what happened next And yet, while Ibsen never wrote a sequel. Everyone wanted to know what happened next. This second episode, now on stage at Theatre On The Square in Sandton, completes the circle. It was penned by American playwright Lucas Hnath. The show stars veteran actor Zane Meas and led by highly-pedigreed South African performer Bianca Amato. 'You really do not need to have seen part one to get into this,' Amato said. 'It is a completely fresh take, with its own bite. The premise is simple. Nora returns because she discovers she is still legally married. She needs a divorce to finish what she started. But of course, nothing is simple.' ALSO READ: TV's 'The Four Seasons' makes you think Nora is no longer a housewife. She has made a name for herself in her worn right, openly criticising the institution of marriage. But her return sets off a chain of uncomfortable and often hilarious confrontations, said Amato. The play throws four characters into a single room and lets the sparks fly. No one is let off the hook. 'It's feisty, funny, moving and thought provoking' 'It is a really feisty, funny, moving and thought-provoking piece,' said Amato. 'You will probably change your mind several times during the show. That is what makes it exciting. No one has all the answers. Everyone is flawed. And the arguments are compelling on all sides.' The dialogue is modern, despite the period setting. The questions it raises are very much for today. Is marriage outdated? Can people change? Is it selfish to put your own growth before your obligations to others? 'It is incredibly relevant,' said director Barbara Rubin. 'When I was preparing for this production, Kamala Harris was running for president in the United States. The backlash she faced as a qualified female candidate was brutal. It reminded me just how far we still must go. 'Spending time with Nora, who has become wiser and stronger, was a kind of comfort during that time.' A gloves-off debate Rubin called the play a gloves-off debate, both personal and political. 'It is about how much has changed, and how much has not,' she said. 'It is smart, but also very funny. That is what makes it work.' Amato is loving the show. 'We are all bringing our best to this,' said Amato. 'The production design is meticulous. The performances are sharp. The story is gripping. It is not some dusty drama. It is a lively, entertaining night out.' NOW READ: Partner habits that drive you crazy
Irish Independent
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Frank McGuinness: ‘I fell in love with Elizabeth Bennet and Huck Finn – they are brilliant, defiant and good for the exercise of body and mind'
Frank McGuinness was born in Co Donegal in 1953 and now lives in Dublin. He has written 16 plays including Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Carthaginians and Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, and 20 adaptations of European classics. His version of Ibsen's A Doll's House won a Tony award.
Los Angeles Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Ibsen's 1879 play left audiences shocked. Now in Pasadena, the door opens to ‘A Doll's House, Part 2'
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.
Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘A Doll's House, Part 2' at Pasadena Playhouse: A woman walks out on her husband and child, and then ...
Mom walks out on husband and child, and then ... Actors Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner have known each other since a chance meeting at the edge of a softball field in Central Park in the late '90s. She was at Juilliard, and he was in graduate school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The pair stood by a fence watching their fellow students play, having no intention of joining the game themselves. Harner recalls Reaser was a particularly potent combination of funny, irreverent, self-effacing and beautiful. As they chatted he thought, 'Oh, this is gonna be fun!' More than two decades later, they are working together for the first time, playing estranged Victorian couple Nora and Torvald in Lucas Hnath's 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' opening Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse. Director Jennifer Chang toyed with the idea of casting an actual married couple in the roles, but once she witnessed the chemistry between Reaser and Harner, she knew she had made the correct choice. It may sound counterintuitive — because the play is a drama tackling themes of class, feminism and parental and filial obligations — but Reaser and Harner's superpower is their ability to laugh together. 'It's fun to work with Jason because he's hysterically funny, and I'm a whore for anyone who's funny,' Reaser says with a wide smile. 'You could be the meanest person on the planet, but if you're funny, I don't care. This is my failing as a human being.' Reaser's laugh erupts without warning, big and loud like a thunderclap; Harner's is equally boisterous. During a recent morning rehearsal the two laughed often and the result was infectious. There was a lightness to the proceedings that belied the seriousness of the issues arising as they practiced the play's final scene. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' picks up 15 years after the events of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 classic. Ibsen's revolutionary script ends with the wife, Nora, walking out on her husband, Torvald, and their daughter in order to discover her full potential as a human being. Hnath's sequel begins with Nora's return. The audience learns what she's been up to all those years, and also what she plans to do now. The razor-sharp dialogue is rapid-fire, and proper delivery requires a keen understanding of the nature and nuance of language. Reaser and Harner have the lines mostly down pat. What they are working on during this particular rehearsal is the minutiae of the blocking. Detailed discussions unfold with Chang about an overturned chair, the placement of a booklet onstage, and when and how Nora grabs her purse off a side table by the door. After an intense back-and-forth between the couple while they are seated on the floor, Chang asks Harner, 'Should you help her up?' 'I thought about it, but then I thought she wouldn't like that,' Harner says of Nora, who is very much her own woman at this point. She is, however, going to be wearing uncomfortable shoes, a large skirt and a corset, Chang offers. 'Maybe we can make a moment of it?' she adds. Harner considers this, twisting the hair behind his right ear with his right hand as he talks. They discuss the meaning behind Nora's words at that particular beat in the script — and their impact on Torvald. Eventually it is decided that Harner will offer her his hand, and she will hesitantly take it. They practice the scene over and over again — each time with a different effect. It's a master class in the specificity of acting for the stage. Harner revels in this work, having started his career onstage before achieving success as a screen actor — most notably as FBI Special Agent Roy Petty in 'Ozark,' as well as in 'Fringe,' 'The Walking Dead' and 'The Handmaid's Tale.' 'I literally could start crying right now, because I miss the theater so much,' Harner says during an interview in Pasadena Playhouse's cozy subterranean greenroom. 'It's important to me. I feel like I'm a better actor when I work onstage.' Reaser has an equally impressive screen résumé, including the 'Twilight' films as well as 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'The Good Wife' and 'The Haunting of Hill House.' Her stage experience is not as deep as Harner's, and for the longest time she thought she couldn't possibly do another play, calling the process 'too psychotic.' Nonetheless, she recently told her husband that she thought she was ready and that she'd particularly like to work at Pasadena Playhouse. Three months later she got 'this random call out of nowhere.' It was meant to be. Harner soon texted her, writing cheekily, 'We're too young, right?' Reaser didn't know Harner had been cast as Torvald. 'I was like, 'Well, who's playing the Nora?' Because if you don't have a good Nora, I don't want to do it,' Harner says. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' opened on Broadway in 2017, notes Chang — before a global pandemic, the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the beginning of President Trump's second term. In some ways, she says, the play is more relevant than ever. 'Reading it now, I was like, 'Oh, my goodness, this is not the play that I remembered,'' she says, adding that context is everything when it comes to interacting with art. 'I'm probably not the person now that I was then.' Reaser and Harner are similarly primed to deliver the show in the context of regional Los Angeles theater in 2025. 'The original play is still revolutionary,' says Reaser. 'The idea of leaving your children is still a shocking, radical thing.' What Hnath did in picking up and reexamining this source material, Harner says, was a remarkable act of harnessing that complexity. 'It's about patriarchy and misogyny, and obviously, primarily, about a woman discovering her voice,' he says. 'But it's also about two people — a couple — who, in one version of themselves, really did love each other.'
Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl finds wisdom in art, motherhood, even grief
One of the mistakes of teaching, I've learned through my years as a part-time professor, is to prepare so much that the students have no choice but to become passive recipients of knowledge that has been predigested for them. The problem is akin to that of an actor who works so assiduously on his own that by the time rehearsals arrive he only wants to perfect what he's worked out on his own. Scene partners be damned. In 'Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl ('The Clean House, 'Eurydice') derives lessons from her years of being, in the very best sense of the phrase, a perpetual student. Even as she has become a master playwriting teacher at Yale, she finds opportunities to learn from those she's paid to instruct. One of the recurring themes of the book is that education, in its highest form, is a dynamic process. Showing up, paying courteous attention and being as willing to receive as to share information are fundamental to the collaborative nature of learning. Even in the classroom, with its necessary hierarchies and rigorously observed boundaries, teaching isn't a one-way street. Authority is enriched, not undermined, by intellectual challenge. The most thrilling moments in my years of teaching drama have come when in the dialectical heat of class discussion, a new way of understanding a scene or a character's psychology emerges from conflicting perspectives. The goal of good teaching, like that of any art, shouldn't be packaged wisdom but the excitement of thought. Being a playwright, Ruhl is perhaps more attuned to how we get smarter when we think collectively. German playwright and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann insisted that 'dramatic dialogue must only present thoughts in the process of being thought.' Eric Bentley, inspired by this anti-didactic precept, commented that what sets Ibsen apart as a playwright is that, rather than offering summaries of existing knowledge, he allows us to be present at the dawning of new consciousness in his characters. We are privy, for example, to the pressurized inner movement that leads Nora to realize at the end of 'A Doll's House' that she must leave her marriage to become her own person. The play ushered in a revolution in modern drama not simply because Nora slammed the door on her husband. What was so radical is that by the end of the play audiences understood why this then-unthinkable act was so necessary. Just as the stage is most alive when actors, authentically responding to one another in the moment, allow unexpected emotions to break through the way they do in life, we are most fully activated when responding directly to the world and not to our assumptions about what we'll find there. For Ruhl, the greatest gift a teacher can give is being present. In a homage to her playwriting mentor, Paula Vogel, Ruhl writes, 'But what strikes me most when I remember Paula's teaching is her presence as much as the content of her teachings. In this country, we are obsessed with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are two teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach). As to whether playwriting is teachable, she asks in response: 'Is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences.' Aristotle understood that human beings are an imitative animal. We learn through identification and imitation. One of my mentors, theater critic Gordon Rogoff, who taught generations of artists and critics at the Yale School of Drama, valued teaching as an exchange of sensibilities. By sharing what mattered to him most in the theater, the values and experiences that shaped him as a writer and teacher, he had faith that our own artistic foundations would become more secure. Instructional manuals and study guides aren't what's needed most. The formative longing is for role models. Everyone could use a more extensive palette of human possibility than the one supplied by the crapshoot of an immediate family. Ruhl recalls Vogel bringing a small group of her students to her Cape Cod home, with its breathtaking ocean view, and asking them to say to themselves, 'This is what playwriting can buy.' Life-changing teachers, like Vogel, expand the frontiers of the dreaming imagination. They can also broaden the ambition of your intellectual scope. From David Hirsch, another professor who shaped her education at Brown University, Ruhl learned not to be afraid of tackling vast questions in her work. 'Professor Hirsch taught me that if you ask a midsize question you will get a midsize answer,' Ruhl writes. 'And if you ask a question that is so big it can't really be answered, you can write and read into the great mystery of things, without being easily satisfied.' When I think of the teachers who shaped my intellectual life, I remember their flamboyant theatricality, uninhibited moral fervor and extravagant articulacy. Above all, I remember their devotion to their subjects, the quasi-religious commitment to whatever their scholarly or creative discipline happened to be. This passion, more than any syllabus, is what engendered my own dedication. These professors loomed as large as superheroes, yet the best weren't afraid to reveal that they were also human. The older I get, the more comfortable I become parting the curtain on my life to remind students that I once sat where they are sitting now, that I know their struggles and have likely made many of the same mistakes. The student-teacher bond is remembered long after the lecture has faded from memory. In Mexico with playwright and legendary playwriting teacher María Irene Fornés, Ruhl entered a crowded taxi that didn't seem to have room for her. But Fornés, alert to the sensitivities of her writing students, reassured her, 'Come on, sit on my lap, I'll be your seat belt.' This playful exchange made a deep impression on Ruhl, perhaps because it illuminated something fundamental about Fornés' unconventional theater aesthetic, which rejected the notion that conflict was the soul of drama in favor of a vision embracing the waywardness and unpredictability of human relations. Fornés believed that a work of art isn't an equation to be solved but an invitation for wonder, which Aristotle considered the beginning of philosophy. Knowledge can excite wonder but so too can a joking voice, a sympathetic gesture and an unforeseen act of kindness. Ruhl tracks the way life continually presents to us opportunities to become more impassioned scholars of the human comedy. From a dying student name Max Ritvo, with whom Ruhl co-authored 'Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship' that was published after his death and later adapted for the stage, she learned 'not to wait for the slow reveal, to tell people you love them now and often' and that 'students sometimes make the best teachers.' From a crotchety neighbor who yelled at her daughters, she learned that responding with a homemade peach pie can establish a more harmonious relationship with a person undergoing his own private travails. Loss is a perennial teacher. In Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story,' Jerry, at the end of a torrential monologue about a vicious dog, has an epiphany that kindness and cruelty combine to form 'a teaching emotion' and 'what is gained is loss.' Which is perhaps another way of saying what is gained is consciousness. Ruhl is a diligent student, learning not in just elite classrooms or before artistic masterworks but from the tyrannous demands of motherhood, the vicissitudes of marriage, the frustrations of modern medicine and the unhurried nature of grief. The sight of a sad-looking neighbor walking his ailing dog every morning teaches her that imagining someone's life isn't the same thing as getting to know the person. The moral is to say hello to the familiar stranger, to write that note of gratitude and to appreciate that teaching and learning are a lot closer to love than we've been led to believe. Ruhl's therapist, who is also a practicing Buddhist, relates a joke that he heard at a conference. 'What do Buddhism and psychoanalysis have in common?' The funny answer, that neither of them works, prompts Ruhl to ask, 'So, if nothing really works in the end, what is the goal?' 'Lightness,' he said. 'Lightness.'
