“DollHouse,” a drama by playwright Theresa Rebeck, based on Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” will be gracing the stage of the Arsenal Center for the Arts from February 28 through March 28.
Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary and featuring Sarah Newhouse as Nora, Jennie Israel as Christine, and Will Lyman as Evan, the show promises to bring a fresh and unexpected take on Ibsen’s play.
For those who need a quick refresher, “A Doll’s House” tells the story of Nora, a kept woman whose husband has just achieved a long sought-after position as a bank manager. With this new position, Nora’s husband must have a spotless reputation. During the earlier years of their marriage, however, Nora falsified documents in order to obtain money for them in a time of extreme need. The man who made this illegal transition possible has now reentered Nora’s life and threatens to ruin her marriage with his knowledge.
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“Theresa Rebeck’s play, it’s an adaptation, it’s not a translation,” explains director O’Leary. “I feel like people who love Ibsen’s play are going to feel very happy when they see the show. They’re going to see the play they know and love, but the circumstances will be different. It still feels very much like Nora. She’s still hiding things from her husband. There’s still the love triangle, there’s still the man form the past that comes back to haunt her.”
When Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” was first performed in 1879, it was a very controversial show. In the final moments of the play, Nora leaves her husband, a decision that was almost unheard of at the time. A more socially acceptable, alternative ending was written to be used at venues that did not feel comfortable using the real one.
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Today, when marriages can be quietly dissolved with little blame assigned to either party, the shock of Nora leaving her husband is not as strong. According to O’Leary, Rebeck’s play focuses on a different, and more contemporary issue.
“I feel that Rebeck did an extraordinary job of taking these people who are so iconic and making them a bit more relevant to us today,” O’Leary says. “She takes a look at what it really means to keep a family together in this economic situation. It would be difficult for the audience to get behind Nora’s family and think, ‘I hope they don’t lose their house,’ because it’s a huge house. It’s hard to feel a lot of empathy towards that situation.
“But the play is much more about looking at these people who are trying to keep their identities, which is what we’re all struggling for. If we’re middle class, we’re looking to stay middle class. We have a lifestyle that we are trying to maintain. It’s not so much about the rich versus the poor, it’s about keeping a family together.”
Rebeck wrote “DollHouse” in 2001, according to O’Leary, which was surprising to her and Kate Warner, Artistic Director of the New Rep Theatre, because the societal turbulence described in the play seemed to perfectly echo the economic fallout of 2007 and 2008.
“It was just as if Rebeck had written it within the past two or three years,” O’Leary says. “And just like Rebeck’s characters, we are now trying to rebuild. There are people who are getting jobs, but there are about 100 people behind them who are trying to knock them down and get the jobs for themselves.“
