Early on, he has Nora and Nils sit back to back while discussing the terms of her loan with a beam of projected light (the lighting design is by Jon Clark) closing in around them. Lloyd over-eggs the dread, distrusting your ability to get subtext. Ibsen inches toward a climax through mundanity. Her creditor, Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan), works under Torvald at the bank but is at risk of losing his job once Nora convinces her husband to hire her recently widowed friend, Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze). Nora has been secretly paying off a debt she incurred from a trip to Italy that she believes saved her husband’s life. Ibsen’s text, in contrast with those choices, lays its track slowly, sitting with Nora amid her attempts to keep up with the Johansens before she has a grasp of her own unhappiness. It’s a noble interpretation of the character but one that, like the staging, over-anticipates the woman she becomes before the play itself gets there. Chastain’s Nora seems to be onto something from the start, never totally oblivious to her situation, with a bit of flint near the surface - a kind of self-certain type she has done on film before. The performance might better fit in a smaller theater, where the whole audience is within breathing distance, but with the spaciousness of a Broadway house (even a relatively small one like the Hudson), the just-the-bones approach makes for thin broth. That’s not all on her: No matter how seriously the action is played, watching someone try to dance a tarantella while sitting in a chair is innately goofy. ![]() The larger actions, however, become forced. In some ways, Lloyd’s staging works in her favor, since like a lot of film actors, she’s most comfortable acting in close-up - always projecting thought with her roving eyes and arching a cheekbone against the light, so you can see a misty tear on it. I thought of a rubber band being pulled back from a thumb to launch across the room that’s held for too long, losing its elasticity.Ĭhastain is, of course, the big draw - in only her second appearance on Broadway (after The Heiress in 2012) despite her public persona as one of Hollywood’s biggest Juilliard-trained theater kids. Waiting for an action that’s so clearly foreshadowed pinches the emotional effect. If you know Ibsen’s famous ending, or even if you’re going off of obvious context clues, you’ll surmise that, eventually, Nora will get up out of that chair. She performs for her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed), playing a happy little songbird, but it strains and exhausts her. ![]() You get the conceptual point rather more quickly than Lloyd thinks you will: Nora Helmer (Chastain) is trapped by the expectations placed on her as a bourgeois housewife. The stage remains bare, and the actors play their scenes in ways that only gesture toward the action described in dialogue. Lloyd puts Chastain in that chair, then keeps her there almost all evening. If only the rest of the production lived up to - or, really, departed from - that first image. The doll, as it were, is present - cooking under the scrutiny of the crowd like a Barbie in a microwave. The year 1879, when Henrik Ibsen’s drama was first published and is set, is projected behind them. Closer to curtain time, the rest of the cast assembles around her in chairs and dark outfits of their own in a tableau combining the aesthetics of the Apple Genius Bar and a Shaker museum. Often, they raise a phone to record a video as she spins past (it makes for a great Instagram Story). In a simple black dress and black heeled boots, she leans back and stares outward, ignoring the bustle of theatergoers climbing over each other to their seats and muttering about how well they know the play or Chastain’s movie stardom. ![]() As members of the audience file into the Hudson Theatre, Jessica Chastain sits motionless in a wooden chair, circling the bare stage on a slow revolve. Jamie Lloyd’s production of A Doll’s House peaks before the play itself begins.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |