Welcome To The Dollhouse

Start with that set. It looks Scandinavian, maybe, with all those wooden planks for walls and floor, sort of an overgrown sauna. And there are plants hanging from above and a thin, curving tree downstage. We will hear birds and bugs and a cuckoo clock. And then there’s that single big armchair, on its side. We’re not sure if we’re inside the house or looking at a porch on the front of it. There’s a sliding door at the back that resembles a barn door.

Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design cues us not to expect the further adventures of Nora Helmer, as though returning to the same place she left so famously and defiantly. In Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic A Doll’s House, Nora went out the door after seeing the falsity her marriage was built upon, leaving her husband Torvald and her three children — forever, we assume. In Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, — playing through May 26 at Long Wharf Theatre — she comes back.

Though not ​“back” so much as stepping into the more avant-garde theatrical space that Ibsen’s work helped to inaugurate. So that when the faithful housemaid Anne Marie (Mia Katigbak) rights the chair and stands transfixed by severe raps at the door as the light dies down, then slides the door open to a burst of illumination, we know this play, in director Will Davis’ sharp sense of its comic detachment, is playing with us.

The scene between Anne Marie and Nora (Maggie Bofill) is awkward and funny, a servant reviving her curiosity about a former mistress absent for 15 years. Played with forthright weariness by Mia Katigbak, Anne Marie chides and frowns and expresses suitable reactions to what Nora tells her. Nora encourages her to a guessing game about what she’s been up to, a game that Hnath expects us to play as well. What, after all, did we imagine would become of a woman making her way alone in those days? That unanswered question, staring Ibsen’s public in the face generation after generation, is reason enough to continue the story.

But the real question here isn’t what Nora has been doing — under a pseudonym, she’s become a popular feminist novelist arguing against marriage — but why she’s back? Quickly she lets Anne Marie know she has no wish to see the children, who have grown up into young adults without her. And she wants to see Torvald, but only when she’s ready. The main problem is that there was never a divorce and so Nora, all this time, has been behaving as a single woman — conducting business and having lovers — which now has come to the attention of an ill-intentioned judge who could lock her up. So, Nora who left with such reckless daring so long ago is back to ask for a divorce.

Yes, the premise feels clunky, though we know that in Ibsen’s time women had no equality with their husbands before the law. And what we see at once is that the plot will trade upon the plausible nature of these characters, while the dialogue will let them dance away from familiar terrain. The point is made abruptly when Anne Marie voices a few expletives, common to our day but not to servants speaking to employers. And it’s underlined when Torvald (Jorge Cordova) makes his entrance like he’s running into a situation comedy. We wouldn’t be surprised if a laugh track followed his every utterance, and indeed Cordova’s delivery of Torvald’s erratic ways helps the play stay buoyant. He’s always a breath of a more bracing air.

The comedy, though, isn’t broad and obvious; it’s more a question of tone. Torvald justifies his reluctance to divorce — ​“you left me” — and there are some skirmishes over the question of which member of this marriage has the most reason for grievance. But the plot keeps turning. If Torvald won’t do Nora’s bidding, and Nora won’t do the judge’s (he wants her to sign a letter recanting her position on marriage), then maybe Nora wants to see her daughter Emmy after all, to help dupe or persuade Torvald.

Sasha Diamond’s Emmy is whip-smart with a lively irony. She wants her mother to know she did just fine without her, and, in rejecting her mother’s view of marriage as prison and oppression, sticks up for herself the way Anne Marie says she raised her to. Emmy makes Nora realize that she’s trading on an old cliché — women’s weakness — in trying to persuade Torvald or in yielding to the judge. Eff it. Enter Torvald seeming to be batting at bees, with a headwound.

It’s at that point that the play sweeps all the plot nonsense aside and lets Nora and Torvald toy with each other in more beguiling fashion. In a sense, all the other scenes have just been preambles to the main scene of the estranged couple coming to terms with what they were together and what they are now. Hnath here seems to write with more conviction, as there’s less sense of scoring off Ibsen and more of trying to be equal to what these two might have learned in all that time. There are some great effects of staging, such as Nora seated in that armchair, raking light coming through the slats behind her, as Torvald appeals to her. And later, the two lay upon the floor, laughing in concert at their earlier selves.

Nora, in Maggie Bofill’s performance, does not court our sympathy; she’s headstrong and self-absorbed, but Hnath gives his characters an interesting propensity for listening, and for reacting to what they hear. We see Nora have to confront people she wanted to be done with, and that makes her become gradually more interesting. If you’ve ever fantasized about seeing the people you left behind to explain why you did what you did, you’ll likely find this play satisfying.

The thematic takeaway is that marriage can be a trap, that it seems antiquated as a custom, and can be oppressive as an expectation. Do we need Nora to come from the past to tell us this? More to the point, for Ibsen, was: could modern marriage be improved? Is there such a thing as progressive marriage? Hnath’s play doesn’t offer much hope in that regard. But who knows? Maybe in Part 3 there will be same-sex marriage, or grandchildren, or …?

A Doll’s House, Part 2 runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through May 26. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.