Theater Review—

An Unfortunate Ending For Long Wharf’s Mainstage Season

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — The word was out that Long Wharf’s final production of the 2009-10 season was to be an updated adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, by Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein. Set in a modern suburb, and interspersing Ibsen’s lines with idiomatic American English, the play has been trimmed by about 25 percent, but, in Edelstein’s words, “omitting virtually none of Ibsen’s ideas.”

Michael Yeargan’s richly detailed set of the interior and exterior of a white frame colonial was a promising start, and the audience awaited with interest to see how the project succeeded.

Unfortunately, it was mostly downhill from there. While it is possible to transport the lavish domestic materialism of a 19th Century European Christmas to Fairfield County, replete with Lego sets and shopping bags from Victoria’s Secret, it is something else entirely to try to recreate the dramatic tension of Ibsen’s iconoclastic ideas in a permissive age where freedom is taken for granted and the psycho-babble of talk radio and daytime television leave little room for shock or indignation.

Ibsen’s plays, which in their time so outraged respectable audiences that theaters were closed and he was driven into exile, were indictments of the hypocrisy and rigidity of the middle class bourgeoisie. The subjugation of women, the smug short-sightedness of the business community, the sanctimonious platitudes of the Church, and the puritanical denial of sexuality were the issues that concerned him. His heroes, and heroines, see the light eventually, but their intellectual growth comes at great personal cost because once they have learned to see the realities of their society, Nora Helmer and Regina Alving (Ghosts) and Thomas Stockmann (Enemy of the People) can no longer fit into the community that nurtured them.

Director-Adaptor Edelstein paid lip service to Ibsen by sticking to the basic plot and including all the characters of the original: Ten years earlier, Nora, the perky little wife of bank manager Torvald Helmer, forged her father’s name on a loan application so that she could pay for a year’s rest cure in Italy for her husband. (Torvald thought his father-in-law was footing the bill. Otherwise he would never have agreed to go.) Nora had to obtain her father’s signature, because women had no economic rights in 1879, so she couldn’t borrow the money herself. For nearly ten years she has been scrimping on the housekeeping money in order to pay back the loan, and keep it a secret from Torvald. For while it saved his health, and his life, his ego would not allow him to admit that he had ever been so dependent on his wife.

Enter three more characters: Christine Linde is Nora’s girlhood chum, now an impoverished widow who had entered a loveless marriage in the hope of providing for her mother and younger brothers. She asks Nora to get Torvald to give her a job in his bank.

Nils Krogstad is the man Torvald will fire, in order to create a place for Christine. But Krogstad is also the man who lent Nora the original money, and he will now blackmail her. If she doesn’t get Torvald to change his mind, Krogstad will reveal the forged contract, and Nora can be sent to jail.

Peter Rank is Torvald’s best friend, a rich bachelor who is devoted to Nora. He confides to her that he is dying of a terminal and horrible unnamed disease.

In the Long Wharf version, as in the original, Torvald is an obnoxious, insufferable dork who, micromanages Nora’s life, and proclaims his love for her even as he constantly belittles her. Nora, in turn, has developed manipulative skills, telling her husband what he wants to hear, and using her charm to wheedle him into granting what she wants.

However, the casual informality of the modern American setting makes it seem unbelievable that she would continue to put up with this treatment. And it is hard to reconcile the stuffy pomposity of Torvald’s speeches with the grinning young husband in jeans and an open necked shirt.

More importantly, this version omits several central points that Ibsen was making. The first was that Nora, like all women of her class, were kept in a state of childlike powerlessness, that made them permanent children. She plays with her own three children as if they are her equals. It is the old nurse, Ann Marie, who is actually a parent to the children — just as she raised the motherless Nora. When Nora resolves to leave Torvald and her children, she justifies her decision by saying that Ann Marie can do a better job than she can of taking care of them.

In this version Ann Marie is portrayed as a casual au pair, who addresses Nora and Torvald by their first names, and is hardly a parent figure for the three children.

In the original, Dr Rank was suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, the result of congenital syphilis, brought on via the sexual double standard that led fathers to consort with prostitutes and then pass the disease on to their children. This was a metaphor Ibsen used on more than one occasion to convey the sickness and corruption of a society that passed on crippling ideas (including the inferiority of women)

When he tries to talk to Nora about his condition, she giggles and is incapable of understanding what he is telling her, because she has been so sheltered, and because she is unable to have a serious conversation.

The audience we sat with seemed impatient with the play, in part because they came to see Ibsen, and in part because in our society marriages break up all the time, and there is nothing shocking about the end. It would only have been a shock if she had stayed with the jerk.