The New, New Nora

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The New York Sun

After the rewrite that caps “Nora,” Thomas Ostermeier’s update of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” all bets are off. Will we see Willy Loman forgo suicide, fire off a terse e-mail to his boss, and turn vigilante, bent on stopping the outsourcing of American jobs? Maybe Curly and Laurie will unite the farmer and the cowman in a guerrilla army, and lead the breakaway republic of Oklahoma. Hamlet and Laertes shall toss their blades and ride off into the sunset: The rest is romance.

The last few minutes of “Nora” are radical in the extreme, but you won’t catch me telling you why. For that you have to go to the BAM Harvey to see the German import yourself. (Or read last Sunday’s New York Times, where an article gave away the surprise in the third paragraph.) Mr. Ostermeier, the coartistic director of Berlin’s Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, wants modern audiences to feel the same shock and awe our predecessors felt in 1879. Needless to say, he doesn’t think that Nora’s famous door-slam, when she turns her back on her family to live an emancipated life, will cut it today.

In this he’s not alone. New York has tasted a steady diet of altered Ibsen lately: Ingmar Bergman’s tweaked “Ghosts,” Ivo van Hove’s V8-spitting “Hedda Gabler,” Lee Breuer’s midgets-and-giantesses “DollHouse.” The question bears asking: If you’re going to stage Ibsen, why not, you know, stage Ibsen? Call me romantic, but I tend to think good actors and skilled designers can make just about anything play, particularly a script by a writer so towering.

But let’s assume Ibsen has lost his punch and grown irretrievable even to the best theatricals alive. In that case, why don’t these bold auteurs find new playwrights to invent new plays, grounding Ibsen’s concerns in a thrilling new idiom? That, too, would sit better. Yet all this disclaiming aside, a third-best impulse can still yield first-rate insights. Mr. Ostermeier comes up with his share here.

In his modern-day vision of Torvald and Nora Helmer’s zany marriage, the clothes say 1970s, the purchasing power says 1980s, and the gadgets say 1990s. The combined aesthetic feels thoroughly 21st-century, right down to Jan Pappelbaum’s towering scenery. Frosted glass, sliding doors, stylish furniture, obnoxiously large fish tank: The whole apparatus rotates 360 degrees, as if to afford us a better view of the Helmers’ finances.

Even tiny social details feel au courant. Torvald (Jorg Hartmann), ever the sensitive patriarch, stops talking into his cell phone headset long enough to chide Nora for her binge-eating. The slender, fine-featured, terrifically sensitive Anne Tismer makes it likely, at least, that our Nora has an eating disorder. She also seems sort of nuts. At one point, her friend Mrs. Linde (Jenny Schily) discovers her turning in circles, staring at her “beautiful hands.”

The chief evidence for her iffy sanity, of course, is the twist at the end. In setting up that climax, Mr. Ostermeier manages to betray Ibsen’s intent, and to reveal it. Nora’s crime is to have lied to save her husband’s life, and continued to lie to keep that information from him: She is the victim of a society, and a husband, unwilling to tolerate equal women. Now her lender, Krogstad (the elegant viper Kay Bartholomaus Schulze), wants a job at Helmer’s bank, and will blackmail her to get it. (“Bank,” in the context of this show, implies something like Goldman Sachs, not the credit union down the street.) She realizes Torvald cannot find out what she has done. “Lies poison a family,” he believes. “The children inhale the corruption.”

As a statement of feminist outrage, this Ibsen is a loss. No woman as assured and cosmopolitan as Ms. Tismer’s Nora, in a modern setting, could be, as she puts it, a mere “Barbie doll in a Barbie house.” No one would deny that she is subjugated, but Mr. Ostermeier’s treatment makes a mess of her motivations. He does much better when proposing that society’s chief flaw isn’t patriarchy, it’s money-madness.

Torvald, Krogstad, and Mrs. Linde have never seemed more desperate when describing how they scrape and claw to get or keep jobs. Amassing and spending money seems to be everybody’s chief concern, and the language of commerce creeps in everywhere. “Can’t I admire my most precious belonging?” says Torvald, pawing at his wife’s crotch in their fancy house. If Nora seems half-crazed, it’s with her own acquisitiveness – and sense of being acquired.

Ibsen insisted that he was writing about human rights generally, not the woman question alone. In that sense, Mr. Ostermeier’s depiction of a society overwhelmed by its moralizing and materialism does the playwright a service. The next time New York gets a proper production of the play, its audience will benefit from the insights gleaned from this sometimes wayward one.

Timely and terrifically acted, the show mostly overcomes its excesses. Between acrobatic leaps across the stage and fumbled seductions, Dr. Rank gives himself a month to live, making him the spryest AIDS victim this side of “Rent.” The whirling scenery is wonderful but sometimes overused, which can also be said of the potent pop score. The last tableau, for instance, leans rather heavily on a song by Annie Lennox, which is not the sort of female empowerment Ibsen had in mind.

***

Danny fights on two occasions: when provoked, and when not provoked. Everybody makes him mad, but everything hurts all the time. He has a poetic kind of soul, and he’ll kick your ass for saying so.

It takes a magnificent actor to make this character work, and a magnificent production to bring John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” to convincing life. Director Leigh Silverman has shown great talent lately, and Second Stage has done itself proud with another 1980s American play this season. But the play mostly eludes them both.

Adam Rothenberg and Rosemarie DeWitt play Danny and Roberta, the hard-bitten pair who battle each other to the point of romance in a Bronx bar. Earthy, inarticulate characters like these seem to trip up sensitive, articulate New York actors not named Falco. The MFA will help you nail Manhattan chic and suburban ennui, but beware the outer boroughs. Except for a few dreamy minutes in Roberta’s bedroom, the show strains after a tone of clear-eyed romance, and rarely finds it. The result fells like “Frankie and Johnny,” if Terrence McNally had written it under the influence of too much David Mamet.

Mr. Shanley has one exquisite moment near the end, an evocation of Catholic guilt. Roberta has done a bad thing, and because she has not been punished, she says the sin has stayed with her. Mr. Rothenberg offers a poignant absolution. “I forgive you – everything you done.” The grace of the writing should make us even more eager to see Mr. Shanley’s upcoming “Doubt,” about little boys and the clergy who love them.

“Nora” until November 13 (651 Fulton Street, between Ashland Place and Rockwell Place, 718-636-4100).

“Danny” until December 5 (307 W. 43rd Street, at Eighth Avenue, 212-246-4422).


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