Directed by Tony-winner Sam Gold, a wildly inventive new American play that picks up after Henrik Ibsen's most cherished work concludes, A Doll's House, Part 2 will boast an all-star cast that features three-time Emmy Award-winner and three-time Tony Award-nominee Laurie Metcalf, Academy Award-winner Chris Cooper, Tony Award-winner Jayne Houdyshell and two-time Tony Award-nominee Condola Rashad.
In the final scene of Ibsen's 1879 ground-breaking masterwork, Nora Helmer makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a life on her own. This climactic event - when Nora slams the door on everything in her life - instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. In A Doll's House, Part 2, many years have passed since Nora's exit. Now, there's a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind?
So, did Godot ever show up? Were George and Martha able to save their marriage? And whatever happened to Nora after she slammed the door? In 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' Lucas Hnath pulls off the dramatic parlor trick of bringing back Ibsen's iconic heroine - in the incomparable person of Laurie Metcalf - to answer that question 15 years later. Despite the modern idiom that Hnath slings around with gleeful humor, it's amazing how women's lives haven't changed.
I have suppressed the impulse to interrogate the logic of the story too carefully; though it makes an unusually strong case for the road it takes, surely there are potholes. But this is not the point. Hnath is not using the preexisting characters and their backstory (let alone the real woman - a friend - on whom Ibsen based the tale) as ways of avoiding having to create something original; rather, they are springboards to something very new indeed. The march of progress, halting as it is, has allowed a male playwright in 2017 to write a work that the inhabitants of A Doll's House (Part 1) in 1879 could never have imagined: a great feminist comedy. By that I mean a stand-alone work that glories in the self-interest and correctability of all women - and all men.
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