Theater Review: A Doll’s House at The Gamm Theatre

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

THEATER REVIEW by Tracey Minkin, Features Editor

Standard bearers of any battle carry not only the flag of their purpose, but an accumulated burden of expectation from those who watch from the field.

Such is the burden placed on Nora, the heroine of Henrik Ibsen's revolutionary play, A Doll's House. Since the Norwegian playwright created the birdlike Nora 132 years ago and placed her in a domestic cage that she ultimately smashes, she has come to be recognized as the first feminist heroine of theater.

Nora's oppression at the hands of not only her rigid and patronizing husband Torval, but more significantly at the hands of society - reveals in unsparing, northern light the pantomime that so many women undergo to keep up appearances while managing bold (and often secretive) actions to protect those they love.

Ibsen's drama forces its audience to witness Nora's frantic and ultimately doomed efforts to maintain her domestic charade as the secretive maneuvers of past years are exposed. It's squirming stuff but must be, and Nora's final (and famous) act at the play's conclusion was at the time so controversial that Ibsen was pressured to rewrite it (he refused).

So, then: with so much expectation, can a production bring dramatic reality to Nora? Can her famous choices reflect human purpose? Can Nora be removed from her historic, nearly political, perch and be brought back to stage, and therefore, dramatic life?

Now, here, at The Gamm Theatre, the answer is yes, and credit must be given to, and shared by, Tony Estrella, Fred Sullivan, Jr., and Jeanine Kane.

An adaptation that works

It begins in the hands of Gamm artistic director Estrella, who has taken bold liberties with recasting Ibsen's setting from 19th century Norway to late 1950s America. While the Madmen trappings of this new Doll's House - Nora in brightly colored period dresses, still tight and binding, as well as a symbolically fake aluminum Christmas tree in the corner, lit with a rotating spotlights (the play takes place at Christmastime) - don't do much to make the story any more vibrant or relevant, but this muscular Americanization of the adaptation, carefully tempered by Estrella from numbers of previous English adaptations, does.

Estrella's plain-speaking but unslangy phrasings give the play a surprisingly bold tempo that drives Nora's (Jeanine Kane) interactions with her husband Torval (Steve Kidd) into tighter corners, reveals the sexy and sadly manipulative interactions with family friend Dr. Rank (Tom Gleadow) for the gender play they are, and adds menace to the threatening confrontations she has with Nils Krogstad (Estrella), the man who holds the key to her fundamental secret and therefore to her undoing.

With just a few moments that ring slightly false (one of Nora's children calls Krogstad "a weirdo," Estrella's update for the more common "that strange man"), the overall adaptation is like a foot on the accelerator of a V8 engine. And the engine of this Doll's House is strong and relentlessly powerful.

A director who drives it

But no good adaptation, particularly one that relies on sharp, clean rhythms and momentum, can succeed without a director to see its pacing realized on stage. Fred Sullivan, Jr., has one of the best ears around for these nuances, and his strong guidance of the production makes the language jump, shove, and tighten. He's placed his excellent cast in corners and doorways, on sofas and easy chairs, in the kind of postures and reclines so typical of the striving class that forms part of Nora's cage. But always, and importantly, their confrontations with each other (and Nora's with her predicament) drive fast and directly. There's much action in this production, and credit goes to Sullivan's command of Estrella's adaptation.

Nora

Woe to the actors who appear in A Doll's House, because all eyes remain, as they must, on its protagonist. But here, thanks to excellent casting and strong direction, the ensemble makes the Helmer household a vibrant, interesting, often funny, setting for the dark journey Nora makes to gain her freedom from all of them.

Finally, though, it all comes down to Nora. And the alto-voiced, lovely but steely Jeanine Kane delivers. Her Nora arrives home on Christmas Eve with a repertoire of preening, housewifely behaviors, birdlike offenses, that border on annoyance. She must strain and preen, so we can see over the course of the play, why she has become the way she is. And watch her cast it off in the play's conclusion.

Kane not only sets her Nora off with confidence, she gives her a sexiness just underneath that brings womanly strength (and sadness) to the narrow role she's forced to inhabit in her life. As events mount, we watch the panic enter Kane's composed face and the tension overtake her hands, and hear the tightening in her voice. By play's end, as she faces her husband in a long confrontation stripped bare of artifice, we can hear the exhaustion and yet opportunity in Kane's lowered voice. With Estrella's fine words, Sullivan's attentive direction, and Jeanine Kane's nuanced, emotional commitment to character, this Nora takes her place, whole and breathing.

In a new Doll's House, this is a Nora who makes it real.

A Doll's House is in production at The Gamm Theatre, 172 Exchange St, Pawtucket, through February 20. For more information, call 723-4266 or go online, here.

Photos: Peter Goldberg

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Email to a friend Permalink