A stripped back Doll’s House on Broadway
The difference between a divorce and a funeral seems lost on the director Jamie Lloyd; ditto for bird cages and prisons and, in the end, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and a sanatorium. Lloyd’s new, minimalist production on Broadway is so stripped of ornament, so unremittingly rote, that this reviewer nearly handed his valuables to an usher and asked for a padded room. At the play’s close, the director has the embattled housewife, Jessica Chastain’s Nora Helmer, make her defiant exit through the back wall of the theater upstage; a garage door opens and she strides onto the rain-soaked pavement, probably to be harassed by tweakers or shoved into oncoming traffic. Peals of laughter erupted in the audience — here was our chance!
