In 2017, when I first saw a production of A Doll’s House, Part 2, it might have been, I dunno, 20 years since I’d first experienced the Henrik Ibsen protofeminist classic that serves as prequel for Lukas Hnath’s 2017 imagining of where Nora might be 15 years after she bravely flew her gilded cage of domesticity.
Back then I didn’t much like Hnath’s script. But after revisiting A Doll’s House this past September and coming away as impressed as ever, I couldn’t not see Long Beach Playhouse’s production of the sequel.
That may not be entirely fair to the Playhouse. But inherent to any “Part 2” project is a comparison to the original. Alas, with A Doll’s House so fresh in my mind, I see that Part 2 is more problematic than I originally thought.
Fifteen years after an awakening that moved Nora (Pagan Urich) to leave her husband (Shawn Plunkett) and three children behind, she has returned to prevail upon Torvald to give her the divorce he promised her when she left, only recently becoming aware that he did not keep his word.
Problem #1 with Hnath’s script is that she did not ask for a divorce. (What she said: “I have heard that when a wife deserts her husband’s house, as I am doing now, he is legally freed from all obligations towards her. In any case, I set you free from all your obligations.”) But you could forget that pesky detail and still feel something is off here, because Ibsen’s Torvald would likely have kept his word. “[Y]ou have always been so kind to me,” Nora avers even after she decided to leave. He was not a bad guy, just misguided — and regretful for his part in her feeling the need to leave.
But lay even that aside, because there is a still bigger problem: Hnath’s Nora seems oblivious to the nuance that is Ibsen’s masterstroke. In Part 2, Nora sees only her victimhood, claiming she was unhappy in her marriage, “felt suffocated [and] like [I] had no options […].” But Ibsen’s Nora gives a different account: “I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them.” The point Ibsen makes is that patriarchy is not merely the blunt-force injustice of denying women equal rights: it’s so insidious that it makes women complicit in their own thralldom. This was Nora’s epiphany: she has allowed herself to exist without full-fledged personhood. Thus, Hnath’s entire play consists of little more than Nora railing against society’s — and Torvald’s wrongs — and scheming so that they do not get the better of her.
Feeling the way I do about this script, there is simply nothing Long Beach Playhouse could have done for me to come away satisfied. Director Phyllis Gitlin has obviously schooled her cast on getting across Hnath’s intentionally overlapping dialog, but it’s written like they are talking at each other, and for the most part that’s the way the actors play it. The best moments may be Plunkett’s early scenes, where Torvald is so overwhelmed and choked with convoluted feelings at Nora’s return that he can barely speak.
A Doll’s House, Part 2 takes place entirely in one room, into which we are effectively immersed by Greg Fritche’s set. Christian Bayer does the same with the costumes, which bear up to the closest scrutiny.
If only that were true of the script. Ironically, the ideal demographic for A Doll’s House, Part 2 is probably people who haven’t seen A Doll’s House or at least do not know it well. Though even through such eyes it can’t possibly look as groundbreaking as its prequel, maybe Part 2 has something worth repeating about what we’ve done to women — and are still doing, after all these years.
A Doll’s House, Part 2 at Long Beach Playhouse
Times: Fri–Sat 8:00 p.m., Sun 2:00 p.m.
The show runs through August 15.
Cost: $23 to $31
Details: (562) 494-1014; LBplayhouse.org
Venue: Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach