Evolution+of+Ibsens'+A+Doll's+House

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Since [|Ibsen's //A Doll's House//]was released in 1879, it has been adapted in hundreds of different ways. It has been played by all men, all women, and one time, a group of little people. The adaptations have closely followed the [|women's sufferage movement]. Nora's evolution has gone from a timid trophy-wife, to a stupid girl, to a homicidal maniac. Torvald has been played as an abusive husband, and clueless baffon, and a killer's victim. The other characters have also been interpretted in strange ways; from angels, to cigar smoking devils. ======


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1950s: Julie Harris is a meek Nora, all wistful eyebrows and tremulous voice, opposite Christopher Plummer's patriarchal, patronizing Torvald. Father, after all, knew best. 1970s: Claire Bloom's Nora is largely an actress—skilled at becoming whoever she's required to be until finally turning firm and stern. ("Sit down," she tells her husband.) Anthony Hopkins's Torvald is verging-on-violent and thoroughly self-congratulatory. The decade also gives us Jane Fonda as Nora. I am Woman, hear me roar. 1990s: Juliet Stevenson's Nora is all self-discovery and brave-new-world wonder, while Trevor Eve counters with a bewildered and tearfully emotional Torvald. Sensitivity session. Directors, too, can't resist the pull of the zeitgeist. A few major examples, these from the stage, illustrate the temptation to situate the Helmers in the mutable moment: 1981: Ingmar Bergman launches his trilogy //A Project for the Theatre// with //Nora//, in which he deconstructs //A Doll's House// (followed by //Julie//, based on Strindberg's //Miss Julie//, and then //Scenes from a Marriage//, a stage adaptation of his own film). In this renowned director's view, the characters are in hell where "the damned are condemned to torture one another." Although Bergman doesn't rewrite Ibsen, he reconfigures him, placing all the play's characters on stage all the time, thus changing the dynamic among them. Mrs. Linde becomes the villain of the piece, triggering the play's catastrophe out of spite and envy. (A new production of //Nora// opens this month at New York City's Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, staged by the recently formed Marvell Repertory Company.) 2003: Lee Breuer creates his "little men" production //Mabou Mines DollHouse//, wherein the women and the children are "normal"-sized, squashed into a miniaturized house, while the male characters are played by little people—and are no less tyrannical for their lack of height. This is accompanied by creepy/jokey music plucked from silent-movie melodrama. 2004: German iconoclast Thomas Ostermeier ends his production not with a door-slam but with a series of gunshots, as Nora unloads, literaly, on a squirming Torvald. Nora wears a Lara Croft costume, and Dr. Rank is a cigar-smoking angel with wings. [|tcg.org] (Theatre Communications Group)