Douglas Messerli [USA]
you
great big beautiful doll
Conceived
by Lee Breuer, adapted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell from Henrik Ibsen’s A
Doll’s House, Mabou Mines DollHouse, St. Ann’s
Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York,
November 2003/ Freund Playhouse, University of California Los Angeles, November
28-
December 10, 2006 /The performance I witnessed was Sunday, December 3, 2006
While it is popular among
contemporary directors to “deconstruct” classic dramatic texts, Lee Breuer
refreshingly “reconstructs” Ibsen’s
great drama. A Doll’s House is, in
fact, one of the Norwegian playwright’s most contrived and preachy works, when
performed today, 127 years after its original premiere, is often a painful
ordeal for actors and audience alike. But rather than eviscerating Ibsen’s
dramatic achievement, Breuer simply revisits the text, investing its metaphors
and Victorian structures with startling new meaning.
The entering audience is greeted with what appears to be a
“collapsed” play, the performance completed, the sets, some of them already
crated, littering the backstage, ready to be shipped off into history.
Obviously, Breuer is reminding us that what we will soon see is a “drama,” a
theatrical representation of life;
but the implications go far deeper: for suddenly as the lights dim, pianist
Ning Yu entering and bowing to the audience, deep red velvet-like curtains—the
kind one might see in European opera houses or theaters of the nineteenth and
early 20th century—fall into place to the sides and back of the
stage. As the play is about to begin a similar curtain falls into place between
the audience and the performance space, giving the sense that something is
about to begin all over again. The previously “collapsed” play, the old Ibsen
warhorse is about to be revived—rebuilt from the ground up. Breuer makes it
clear that we about to witness a new work,
Mabou Mines Dollhouse.
Indeed, with the front curtain’s rise Nora rushes forward like
a manic doll herself and, along with stagehands raises the collapsed set—a
dollhouse gift for her children’s Christmas, complete with doors, windows,
chairs, couches, desks, and a hanging chandelier—an imitation Victorian living
room, built to size of Emmy and Ivar Helmer, Nora’s beloved daughter and son.
Maude Mitchell’s Nora resembles a frenzied wind-up doll more than a Victorian
mother, a machine reacting to events and others around her. The text simply
reiterates what we have already discerned, Nora is less a human being than toy, her husband Thorvald responding to
her return home with a litany of his pet names for her: lark, squirrel,
skylark, spendthrift, featherhead, and sweet tooth, nearly all prefaced with
the diminutive “little.” As the doorbell rings and Nora scurries about to tidy
up the room (in both Ibsen and the Mabou Mines version), she also readjusts the
clock, resulting in the appearance of the clock’s cuckoo—reiterating both her
silly and foolish condition and the fact that, like the bird who lays its eggs
in other bird’s nest, this lean, talk, blonde is as completely out of place in
her miniaturized world as she is out of time; like Dilsey, the black servant of
William Faulkner’s Compton family, she automatically readjusts the clock—and in
Nora’s case, readjusts herself over and over again to life in a tiny world
where at moment one fears she may break the toy chairs and couches simply by
sitting upon them.
The visit of her school-girl friend, Kristine Linde,
reiterates the abnormalcy of Nora’s life, for, at first, Helmer’s still
beautiful wife hardly recognizes her friend, who, having to support herself and
family for the last few years, seems less like Nora’s contemporary than an
older, maiden aunt. Even she describes her friend as a “child.”
Kristine has come to ask Nora to intercede with her husband on
her behalf for a job—a position which temporarily delights Nora by giving her a
sense of purpose, and, accordingly, she admits to her friend that she has
previously “saved” her husband’s life years before by borrowing money so they
might travel for his health to Italy. This revelation is, in fact, the crux of
the play, representing as it does in Nora’s mind her one selfless and
responsible act—perhaps the only act which she has been able to accomplish as
an adult. Simultaneously, however, it has enslaved her to another man, one of
Helmer’s underlings at his bank,
the evil Krogstad, whom, Helmer, having now risen to the position bank manager,
is about to fire.
All this information—tedious if necessary background plot in
Ibsen’s “well made play”— is a delight to behold in the Mabou Mines
reconstruction, as Mitchell emotionally flits from a naughty, secretive
schoolgirl to a pampered and willful wife to a woman proud of her
accomplishment and sacrifice.
Much of Helmer’s early encounter with
Nora occurs—even in the original Ibsen drama—between rooms, as he calls from
his office out to his wife. Breuer and Mitchell have simply delayed their face
to face encounter so that when Helmer finally enters his appearance is an
ironic inevitability: the males in this cast are performed by little people,
men no taller than 4 and one half feet. Suddenly we perceive that the dollhouse
in which Nora and Kristine awkwardly sit and converse is the perfect size for
Nora’s children (the son played by a primordial female dwarf, Hannah Kirtzeck)
and for Helmer and his male peers, Dr. Rank and Nils Krogstad. If this may at
first appear as a kind of simplified gimmick, a ridiculous literalization of
Ibsen’s tropes, by play’s end it has forced its audience to rethink Ibsen’s
world, bringing The Doll’s House into
the 21st century. The shock of Nora’s slamming door for late 19th
century audiences is recreated for us, as we face, in the Mabou Mines version,
a world in which Nora is dislocated and from which she is dissociated, forced
to behave in a contorted doll-like manner—behavior brilliantly displayed in
Maude Mitchell’s con-catenation of sound (from baby talk babble to sexually
explicit groans and moans to Garboesque quips in mock Scandinavian brogue) and
movement (with all the bends, twists, turns and long-legged splits of a Raggedy
Ann).
Breuer also mines the whole range of Ibsen’s structural
devices, revealing the evil machinations of characters such as Krogstad to be
related to the popular melodramatic gestures of late 19th and early
20th century plays and the stuffy, comic posturings of Ibsen’s
provincial folk as sharing something with Feydeau’s farce. The creator/director
underscores Nora’s sexual titillation of Helmer’s friend, Rank (upon showing
him her silk stockings Nora continues: “Aren't they lovely? It is so dark here
now, but to-morrow—. No, no, no! you must only look at the feet. Oh, well, you
may have leave to look at the legs too.”), resulting in his startling
declaration of his love that in this production—along with Krogstad’s threat to
reveal her forgery of her father’s signature on the contract for the loan—sends
the flailing doll-wife nearly over the edge, strobe lights recreating her sense
of a manic speeding up of time and place. Given the sudden dilemmas with which
Nora is faced, it is almost as if she has been forced to jump from her
protected Victorian household into the stark and often frightening realities of
domestic life with which we are all faced today.
Similarly, Thorvald’s Act III confession that he
“objectifies” his wife—he describes himself speaking little to her and sending
stolen glances in her direction so that we might pretend that they are
“secretly” in love, that she is his “secretly promised bride”—is revealed in
the Mabou Mines’ production for what it truly is, a voyeuristic and fetishistic
act that culminates in a near rape—unimaginable in Ibsen’s day—that seems to
lie just below the surface Helmer’s confession in the original that his “blood
in on fire” and his reminder that he is her husband with a husband’s rights.
Indeed, Breuer and Mitchell draw on the whole bag of dramatic
styles—tragic, histrionic, melodramatic, comic, farcical, and absurdist (a
demonstration akin to the various dramatic genres named by Hamlet’s resident pedant, Polonius)—to point up the implications of
Ibsen’s dialogue.
I have always thought Ibsen’s plays to be close to spoken
operas, something which apparently also struck the creators of Mabou Mines DollHouse, as the drama
morphs into a representation of an opera house (stunningly designed by Narelle
Sissons), each box seat filled with male and female puppets, paralleling the
now larger than life Nora playing the miller’s beautiful daughter to Helmer’s
Rumpelstilskin as she sings an operatic aria of her desire for a miracle that
never occurred. Pulling away her clothes to reveal her breasts and mons pubis,
this Nora, in her declaration that she longer believes that wonderful things
might happen, whips off her wig of golden locks to reveal a shaved head before
she slams the door to the box in which she has been entrapped. If the play
began in the 19th century, it ends in the possibility that in the
future men may live in an empty world where women powerfully avenge the wrongs
they have been forced to suffer.
Los Angeles, December 4, 2006
Copyright
©2007 by Douglas Messerli
Douglas Messerli is the editor of Green Integer and The
Green Integer Review. He is currently working on a multi-volume cultural
memoir.
|