Interview: Jennifer Chang of A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2 at Pasadena Playhouse
A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2 begins at Pasadena Playhouse on May 14.
Before being tapped to direct A Doll’s House, Part 2 for Pasadena Playhouse, Jennifer Chang mostly remembered Ibsen’s canonical work as a play she read while in undergrad. It has been interesting, then, to not only reflect on a Norwegian play from 1879 through a contemporary lens, but to additionally reflect on Lucas Hnath’s 2017 play through 2025’s landscape. “I was surprised to see how differently I remembered the play,” Chang reflects when I ask if she had seen the production which garnered 8 Tony Award nominations including an ‘Actress in a Leading Role’ win for Laurie Metcalf. “When I saw it, I was really rooting for Nora, but now reading it, I felt like, ‘Oh wow. She’s being confronted by these hard truths from everyone else. There’s lots of invisibility around her.’”
This initial experience revisiting the text seems to have informed Chang’s approach to staging the play. “I remember Laurie Metcalf, of course. But would she ever be cast as Nora in A Doll’s House?” Chang wonders, “How do we see the Russian nesting doll of who Nora was in this homage to the original play?” As a woman, a wife, and a mother, it felt important to Chang to explore, “Yes. She came back. But also, this is a woman who left. How do we see she’s still the same ‘doll' with the same soulful fragility and mental toughness?” At the same time, Chang acknowledges the limitations which exist in the piece. After all, she surmises, “Nora can’t speak for all women.”
“I love to think I’m a play doula, or a locksmith. I listen to the ‘dings’ to figure out what the code is.” An actor first, Chang has been thrilled to dive into this text with the team at Pasadena Playhouse. “This is an actors’ piece— there are no pyrotechnics to hide behind, so this has been a dream team. They really want to investigate this text— to study the punctuation or an interesting turn of tense.”
It will be interesting to hear how audiences respond to Chang’s approach to A Doll’s House, Part 2 and if, like Chang, they feel new ways about the play than they may have felt about its premiere 8 years ago.
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