Theatre in Review: A Doll's House (Hudson Theatre)

	Okieriete Onaodowan, Jessica Chastain. Photo: Courtesy of A Doll's House.

I worry about the director Jamie Lloyd. A gifted artist, he seems to have slipped into some sort of decline. How else to explain how his productions have become drained of color and vitality? It all started out so well, too: His revival of Betrayal, seen on Broadway in 2019, was starkly gripping, unfolding on a gray set featuring little more than two turntables and some ice-cold lighting; this stripped-to-the-bone approach was perfect for Harold Pinter's autopsy of an extramarital affair and its collateral damage. It met the playwright where he lived, getting to the frozen heart of the matter with thrilling efficiency. It was, I think, the best staging of Pinter I have ever seen.

Disconcertingly, Lloyd applied the same subtractive approach to Cyrano de Bergerac, seen at BAM last spring, removing every touch of the florid and theatrical from this grand-manner melodrama, up to and including the title character's supersized nose. The actors, dressed in contemporary styles, were posed against a shallow white box and, later, a set of stairs; they were also miked to the nth degree, a strategy that, among other things, transformed the title character into a kind of poetry slam artist. It was sometimes effective, sometimes peculiar; a play that glories in wit, wordplay, and sweepingly romantic gestures lost some of its allure, although many were taken with James McAvoy's Cyrano.

Now Lloyd and his regular design team -- Soutra Gilmour (scenery and costumes), Jon Clark (lighting), and Ben and Max Ringham (sound) -- tackle Ibsen's landmark drama, proving, definitively in my view, that one size does not fit all. This is an unfurnished Doll's House: The stage is empty, except for a couple of chairs and a turntable that gets a busy workout. Despite a projection announcing the time frame as 1879, everyone is dressed, circa 2023, in hipster black. (Enver Chakartash is the co-costume designer; the clothes, at least, are attractive.) The ultra-dim lighting washes out everything, making the white actors look like vampires and rendering the Black actors' faces all but unreadable. (If you go, do not consider sitting farther back than the twelfth row of the orchestra, I'd skip the mezzanine and balcony altogether.) If you can't get a good look at the actors, you'll hear them just fine, thanks a sound design that picks up the tiniest whisper. Still, given the general dimness and lack of movement -- Jessica Chastain, who plays the beleaguered heroine Nora, is seated for ninety-nine percent of the evening -- this is the closest thing to a radio play Broadway has seen in years.

It's particularly strange concept because A Doll's House, treated straightforwardly, has the pace and tension of a thriller. Nora, the willfully childlike hausfrau, has, for entirely unselfish reasons, borrowed money behind her husband's back; to get the money she forged a signature, opening herself up to blackmail or, worse, prosecution. (Given her family's checkered history, even a hint of anything criminal would be ruinous.) As she races to bury the evidence, she discovers that her household, indeed her entire existence, is erected on a foundation of lies. Nora's ultimate disillusionment is the very stuff of drama: Janet McTeer (on Broadway in 1997) played her as a ball of fire, a comet who, faced with the truth, comes crashing to earth. Hattie Morahan (at BAM in 2014) made her a well-intentioned schemer, trapped in a web of deceit and frantically fighting to get out. Chastain, who barely gets a chance to stand up, offers a performance scaled for the motion-picture camera; this is a Nora in repose.

Ironically, the decision to remove anything that smacks of the 19th-century theatre results in a production that, if anything, feels mannered and artificial. As you enter the theatre, Chastain is already seated, circumnavigating the stage on the turntable, looking blank. If this is meant to set a tone, it's a mistake; it merely allows audience members to shoot smartphone footage of their favorite movie star. Arian Moayed, as Nora's husband Torvald, plays one scene leaning against the upstage wall, twenty-five or thirty feet away from Chastain, never mind that they are having an intimate conversation. As Krogstad, the blackmailing bank clerk who puts the squeeze on Nora, Okieriete Onaodowan is seated back-to-back with Chastain, facing upstage; we hear him perfectly, but he might as well be delivering his lines from the wings. Joined by Jesmille Darbouze as Kristine, Nora's old friend, the three actors are spread across the turntable's diameter with yards of space between them. Thank God for those mics; in real life, they'd have to scream to hear each other.

Lloyd sticks to his grimly restrictive conventions even when Nora rehearses her famous tarantella. This is one of the play's most telling scenes; the dance is Nora's party piece, and the social-climbing Torvald wants to show her off, like a clever pet, to a roomful of prominent partygoers. It's a brilliant dramatic opportunity: Nora, frightened, exhausted, and aware that the walls are closing in, pushes herself to the point of hysteria. Here, Chastain, still in that damn chair, executes a few halfhearted steps before falling to the floor, apparently going into spasms. "You certainly need a lot of rehearsal," her husband says. Perceptive guy, that Torvald.

Chastain's exertions here are the exception, not the rule. Because of the sound design, no one ever needs to raise a voice; it's a evening of film acting and if it sometimes achieves a certain intimacy, the actors often lapse into a collective flat affect, as if running their lines backstage. This occasionally leads to unintended comic effects: At the performance I attended, when Krogstad said, "I've never been this happy," Onaodowan's deadpan delivery sent a titter through the audience. If that's happiness, I'd hate to see him clinically depressed.

Indeed, all the actors -- including Tasha Lawrence as the nanny of the house and Michael Patrick Thornton as Dr. Rank, Nora's dying confidant -- seem uneasy with Amy Herzog's version of the text, which tries to straddle two centuries, falling somewhere in the middle. Phrases like "tons and tons of money," "loan shark," and "fuck it all" sound especially odd coming from the mouths of the Victorian-era haute bourgeoisie. Moayed struggles the most in this respect; Torvald's pontificating manner with Nora clashes with his chic wardrobe and casually contemporary dialogue. Men in 2023 are perfectly capable of belittling their wives, but the terms are usually different; having him refer to Nora as "birdie" instead of the usual "little squirrel" doesn't solve the problem.

Chastain seems to have an interesting take on Nora, envisioning her as an expert people pleaser, carefully tracking her effect on others and quickly calculating her next move. At the moment, however the performance is a disconnected string of ideas, lacking a progression from deluded innocence to profound disenchantment; much of the time, she seems to exist outside her character, looking on analytically. She seems most at ease with Thornton, perhaps because of the faintly guilty closeness shared by Nora and Rank; they seem like co-conspirators, shedding their masks only with each other.

But, instead of a hot-blooded drama rife with tension, climaxing in the destruction of a family -- Nora and Torvald's children will surely be scarred by their mother's abandonment -- Lloyd gives us a series of glacial tableaux, as if real emotion would require too much energy. It's a reductive approach, focusing tightly on Nora instead of the stifling, dishonest world in which she dwells. (Every character onstage has been brushed with scandal and/or has been damaged by the dead hand of convention, which is why her ultimate decision will seem so shocking.) It's the first time, in my experience, that A Doll's House overstays its welcome. Call it creaky but, handled with care, it bristles with life; here, it seems to be looking for a place to lie down. --David Barbour