“This is a hard story to tell.” So writes Joan Didion near the start of her 1984 novel, “Democracy,” a book that’s narrated by a character named Joan Didion, who describes the difficulty of devising a whole fiction in the fragmented modern world. Like a number of her contemporaries or near-contemporaries—Julian Barnes and Renata Adler among them—Didion is ultimately challenging the writer’s empirical “I,” a subject that Susan Sontag tackled in an essay published in this magazine, in 1973:
In many ways, the work of the thirty-seven-year-old playwright Lucas Hnath grows out of the authorial complexities of that older generation of writers. (He owes something to Tom Stoppard, too.) But instead of writing directly about the experience of writing or not writing, inventing or not inventing, Hnath has now found himself by parsing and filling in a story he didn’t write, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”
“A Doll’s House, Part 2” (directed by Sam Gold, at the John Golden), Hnath’s invigorating ninety-minute, intermissionless work, is an irresponsible act—a kind of naughty imposition on a classic, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s signature play with the humor that the nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises a number of questions, such as What constitutes an individual achievement in this age of the simulacrum, when everything owes something to something else?
Ibsen was born about a hundred and fifty years before Hnath, in Skien, Norway, into a family of merchants. His parents were unusually close, and he was both fascinated and horrified by their relationship. The question of intimacy—and its connections to money, Christian morality, and gender roles, or, more specifically, how a woman should behave—excited his dramatic imagination and also made him a critic of the mores he grew up with. Widely considered the father of modern realism, Ibsen wrote “A Doll’s House” in 1879, and it changed everything. Before that, he’d produced a number of scripts in verse, but poetry had sort of prettified his characters, and the restrictions of the form prevented them from getting to the heart, or the marrow, of their stories. Ibsen switched to prose for its more immediate effects—and as a way of shocking audiences out of their complacency. “A Doll’s House” did just that.
In Ibsen’s day, people went to the theatre to see their values upheld, not attacked. When Nora Helmer, the play’s protagonist, shut the door on her husband, her children, and her bourgeois life, and went out into the world with no connections to her past and none to advance her future, it was left to the audience to wonder what would become of her. To go from dreaming about Nora’s life to writing it required a leap of faith—an author’s faith in his own imagination—and that’s the kind of energy that jumps out at you from Hnath’s play, his strongest yet. It’s a treat to watch his Nora come to life without sacrificing the emotional and political architecture that Ibsen built into and around her.
The characters in the piece are the same as in Ibsen’s, until they become something else—Hnath’s. The setting: a high-ceilinged sitting room in a nineteenth-century middle-class home. It’s sparsely furnished and bright. What you notice first is the door, dark and tall. Someone is knocking and a maid, Anne Marie (Jayne Houdyshell), enters, huffing and puffing. “Hold on, I’m coming,” she says. Opening the door, Anne Marie discovers Nora (Laurie Metcalf). In her stylish hat, fitted jacket, and long skirt, she looks prosperous as she walks purposefully toward—what?
Well, well. Here she is again, after so many years—fifteen, to be exact. Since leaving her husband, Torvald (Chris Cooper), Nora has discovered her own voice and become—drumroll, please—a writer. A popular feminist writer who writes under a pseudonym. Her first book was about a woman who was in a seemingly good marriage, with children and so on, and who left it all, just like that. Having basically written her own story, Nora discovered that many other women had experienced similar predicaments. Now she’s in town very briefly, with a task to accomplish. It turns out that she’s not divorced from Torvald. She needs him to sign a document saying that he is divorcing her: by law, no woman can divorce her husband without proof of mistreatment.
While Houdyshell and Metcalf go about their work—each gives her role the ideal pacing, balancing humor and resentment with business that is unexpected and true, such as Nora’s habit of taking swigs of water from a bottle she keeps in her bag, like a jogger cooling down after a long run—the ideas keep coming, fast and delicious. Nora has written a book about her life? How could she do that when Ibsen invented her and Hnath is reinventing her? How real is she? Because we know her story, she’s real to us, maybe even more real than what’s happening outside the theatre. The thoughts go on: We’re watching a play written, in a sense, by two male playwrights. Wouldn’t it be “truer” if a woman wrote the story? Or is Nora, as played by the fierce Metcalf, writing her story now, by making Hnath’s text her own?
Like so many of Stoppard’s works in which historical figures come up against the playwright’s irrepressible love of ideas, Hnath’s script is a kind of metafiction. “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is a play about a play, and about men looking at women—though not condescendingly, or with anything approaching lust and, thus, the idea of possession. Although Hnath’s Nora is free, she, like most of us, is still bound to the thing that we can leave behind but never fully divest ourselves of: family.
I’ve seen all Hnath’s plays that were produced downtown. This is his first Broadway venture and the first of his works that has moved me in a complete way. There were moments in his 2015 piece, “The Christians,” that rocked me, but “Red Speedo” (2016) left me cold. It felt trumped up, hanging on a sliver of an idea, and an old idea at that: male competition, inside and outside the locker room. “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is less implicitly macho than Hnath’s previous works, perhaps in part because it has a gay influence: David Adjmi’s “Marie Antoinette” (2013). Like that work, Hnath’s is divided into scenes marked by titles and uses language that stresses the colloquial in a period setting. (It has become a trend in downtown theatre to take a work set in another era and infuse it with talk from this one. Presumably, the intention is to create a slightly “off” or disjunctive atmosphere, but I suspect that the device will soon start to feel tired.) And Sam Gold’s direction, very cast-supportive, reminded me of Rebecca Taichman’s vision for the Adjmi play, down to the swiftness with which the lines were spoken and the way scenes sometimes began with little preamble. It was thrilling to feel that the writer and the director weren’t condescending to us and assumed we’d keep up. We do, because Nora matters to us and will always matter to us.
It doesn’t feel as if Gold has really done much with Chris Cooper. But that may not be Gold’s fault: Cooper’s passive-aggressive energy, sublime on film, gets swallowed up by the powerful actresses around him. (He’s the only man in the piece.) Metcalf does her best to draw him out, to help him dramatize his interiority, but all he really conveys is a kind of soft-edged confusion; you can’t see or feel Torvald’s anger when he discovers Nora in his home. Conversely, Condola Rashad, as Emmy, the daughter Nora left behind, is perfect in every way. Now a grown woman, Emmy meets her mother with her back stiff with propriety and her self firmly in place. She will not follow Nora’s path, but has forged her own—in the more comforting country of convention. In Emmy’s scene with Nora, recriminations float just above the strained pleasantries between mother and child. There’s something profound, too, in the words that Emmy won’t speak, or even let herself think: How could you have left us for anything, let alone for self-love? She stares out into the theatre. If she looked at Nora directly, would she die of love? Or rage? I have seen Rashad in a variety of roles on Broadway, and in each one she has lacked either a great script or a great director—the shows just never came together for her. This one does. And it takes a moment for us to recall that in Ibsen’s play Emmy has only a walk-on part; she isn’t heard from. This means that she is Hnath’s most fully invented character in this spectacle about family, law, and a woman’s right to choose—at a price. For Emmy, Hnath didn’t need to push Ibsen aside to find his way; he simply, and not so simply, trusted his own imagination to carry the joy and the weight of telling a story, of making things up. ♦
