Jessica Chastain Electrifies a No-Frills Broadway Revival of ‘A Doll's House’
On the Hudson Theatre’s bare stage, Jessica Chastain is sitting on a chair, revolving on a spinning section of it. Round and round the Oscar-winning actor goes. Audience members take their seats. She gazes out at the Broadway audience impassively, a ghost of a smile on her face, dressed in modern, modish black. Slowly, other characters in this modern adaptation of Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House (booking through June 10)—adapted by Amy Herzog, and directed by Jamie Lloyd—sit on seats on the stage, like satellites of Chastain, as she continues to spin.
The play begins sharply, with the spinning at an end, and Chastain as Nora Helmer taking on husband Torvald (Arian Moayed) on the subject of money, the all-consuming catalyst for what leads to Nora’s infamous break for freedom at the play’s climax, finally fed up of being coddled, patronized, and confined as a wife and mother. And wow, the final seconds of A Doll’s House conveying Nora’s liberation are stunningly realized—in theatrical terms epic, while also silently, fabulously melodramatic. Hold out for the visual OMG of the dénouement. It is, right now anyway, the best ending of any show on Broadway.
Those final moments are in stark contrast to the main body of the play. There is no set decoration, no props. When characters put on dresses, have parties, freak out over letters, and—most infamously in Nora’s case—slam the door on the family home, there are none of those things. The characters say they are doing things, but they are just speaking to each other. The Helmer children, Ivar, Bob, and Emmy are mentioned, they are played with and chided—but they are not seen. This stylistic trickiness is seductive at the start, but its obsessive negation of any conventions begins to annoy; thankfully the excellent actors do not.