Award winning playwright Lucas Hnath's brisk, sophisticated, philosophical, and witty A Doll's House, Part 2 opened the Cloverdale Playhouse's 12th Season this Thursday in front of a first night's appreciative, though small storm-related audience.
If that title seems familiar, hold on: Hnath has imagined what might have happened some fifteen years after Nora Helmer infamously left her marriage and family in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1859 Norway, slamming the door on her way out. -- In the opening moment of ...Part 2, there's a persistent knocking on that same door. -- Enter Nora.
During the next 90-minutes, we will find out her motives for leaving, what Nora [Sara Kay Worley] has accomplished in the intervening years, why she has returned, and what she wants and doesn't want from husband Torvald [Michael Buchanan], family nanny Anne Marie [Teri Sweeney], and now young adult daughter Emmy [Soukayna Sabro], all characters in Ibsen's drama. -- It isn't necessary for audiences to know Ibsen's play; Hnath seamlessly fills in all the necessary backstory in the exchanges of his dialogue, so there should be no confusion about what happened fifteen years ago, what has changed since then, and what remains intact.
J. Scott Grinstead's stark minimal drawing room surrounded by a stellar Nordic landscape is the setting for a sequence of mostly two-character scenes -- arguments, negotiations, and often playful philosophical exercises -- in which director Sam Wootten leads his gifted ensemble of four actors through the predictable and occasionally surprising events that may not resolve all the issues, but which challenge them and us to the task of listening attentively and connecting them to 21st-Century matters. It certainly helps that Hnath's often peppery dialogue is so refreshingly modern that it imbues his characters with ideas and sensibilities similar to our own.
Ibsen's Nora notoriously broke all the conventions of traditional marriage, risking social censure, poverty, and criminal offenses by leaving; Hnath's Nora has had time to come to grips with her choices and create a comfortable independent life for herself by writing popular feminist books, but is trapped by the social and moral restrictions that impact her still and are intolerable to her. Having discovered that Torvald had never signed the divorce papers, she understands that not only is she legally dependent on him, but additionally she could lose everything she earned on her own, including her liberty, and bring ruin to herself and to her family if her situation remains as it is.
Yes, her liberty came at a cost, but it is something she won't give up without a fight. Facing recriminations from Torvald, Anne Marie, and Emmy, and being resolute in claiming her own well-being, there are few alternatives, none of which is satisfactory: return to the marriage, admit to and recant her previous actions, or engage in additional fraud and suffer the consequences.
Nora is so resolute at the beginning, even though she tries to avoid meeting anyone but Anne Marie who she has conscripted to help; but it's not so easy, as the nanny challenges Nora's designs. This is the start of many more debates on the value of traditional marriage, the plight of women in a patriarchal society, the responsibilities we have towards ourselves and one another, how we often misinterpret other people's behavior and choices, and the cost of the choices we make. Very modern, indeed.
Dressed in Katie Pearson's fine period costumes, the acting company take us on their individual journeys through their commitment to naturalistically depicting the play's conflicts while revelling in Hnath's insightful comic wit. -- Mr. Buchanan, a bundle of repressed anger and frustration, doesn't even recognize his wife at first, refuses to do what she asks, and later demands that "we should talk", reminding us that even in Ibsen's play they had never had a serious conversation. Ms. Sabro's Emmy is a puzzle, a modern young woman who nonetheless seems to want a traditional marriage for herself, and who challenges her mother to break the law again and finally be out of her life. Ms. Sweeney [a veteran actor turning in one of her most nuanced performances here] demonstrates how much one can see both sides of an issue while steadfastly defending her own moral principles.
But it is Ms. Worley who must carry the weight of the production. As we watch her credible and balanced attempts to get what she wants for herself and for all women, and with the several obstacles put in her way by the other characters' challenges that cause Nora to re-evaluate her initial purpose, we too are drafted into her world, recognize the validity of more than one side of an argument, and apply her dilemma to our own lives.
