A Doll's House Part 2- Review
Find Full Review at: https://www.ledgertranscript.com/Peterborough-Players-review-27916569
Review: ‘A Doll’s House Part 2’ - The Monadnock Ledger
In the Reviewer’s Chair
Published: 8/28/2019 6:14:13 PM
When Nora Helmer leaves her family at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” slamming the door behind her, her fate is left up in the air. Does she find happiness and independence in her new life, apart from her husband, Torvald; or does she return?
In Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” – written over a hundred years after the original and taking place fifteen years after that fateful door is closed – an answer is given. Nora has become a novelist, and a successful one at that, who has used her unhappy story to inspire countless other women to ask themselves if the lives they lead and if the marriages they share are truly fulfilling.
A familiarity with the original play is not necessary to comprehend the wonderment of this one, but if one is had there are wonderful similarities to be noticed. Most notably is the continued instances of blackmail and ruination.
In Ibsen’s play, Nora is blackmailed for illegally signing papers to get a bank loan that would help her save her husband’s life. In this play, Nora’s work has led women to divorce their husbands and one such man, a judge, has managed to learn Nora’s real name despite her writing with a pseudonym. He has discovered that her husband never divorced her, making her not only a hypocrite, but a criminal. He’s a man in a position of power who could destroy everything she’s built for herself. So, Nora starts the play by knocking on a door and walking back into her old life. What should be a simple task of getting Torvald to file for that divorce, grows into something greater and has Nora and the people around her asking themselves if they are happy and if they deserve better, a carried theme from Ibsen’s work.
TOP ARTICLES1/5READ MOREJAFFREY SELECT BOARD VOTES TO AMEND ALCOHOL BAN TO INCLUDE BEACHES
With a wonderful cast of four, “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is simply riveting. Lisa Bostnar plays Nora, whose years away have given her time to find the happiness she never could have found within the walls of her previous life; Gus Kaikkonen is Tovald, who’s grieved more for the decisions he didn’t get a chance to make than he has for the ones he did; Carolyn Michel is Anne-Marie, the nanny who raised not only Nora, but her children as well, who has spent her whole life loving without really considering why; and Second Company member Katie Shultz plays Nora’s daughter Emmy, who is everything Nora was in the original play, but with the happiness she so lacked. Together, as their characters air their grievances with each other, they bring this electric piece of theatre to life.
“A Doll’s House, Part 2” is not Ibsen beyond the characters, the voice is different, the style is different – in fact, this is every bit a comedy as the original is a drama – but the small truths and themes that live within the dialogue are very real. When Torvald reads a book Nora wrote based on her life with him, he takes issue with it in a way that echoes the upheaval Laura Keiler, Ibsen’s inspiration behind Nora, must have felt upon seeing a tumultuous piece her life played out without her permission. Nora’s continued insistence that women should not be defined or limited by their marriages, that people should love and just keep loving, is a grander and fully realized version of why she leaves Torvald at the end of the original. Despite the modernistic dialogue, which does a grand job of engaging the audience, and the swell from drama to what is almost a farce, it’s truly the messages at the heart of the show that make it such a compelling sequel.
Directed by Keith Stevens, the Peterborough Player’s production of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is funny, captivating and so very alive. It runs from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8.
Cheyenne Heinselman is an actress and a playwright, a member of the International Thespian Society Troupe #7883, as well as an avid and opinionated supporter of the arts.