Welcome to the DollHouse

DollHouse is Teresa Rebeck’s updated version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I will admit that while I have probably read the Ibsen play, I do not remember many of the details and will not try to compare the two. We meet Nora, a woman returning to her beautiful house after a day of Christmas shopping at high end stores. Her husband, Evan is about to start a new high-power job running a bank. He recently suffered a heart attack and having had a second chance, he likes to inform others of the dangers of sugar. While Evan was sick, the couple ran out of money, and Nora gets help from Neil to embezzle money to help them maintain their lifestyle without Evan’s knowledge. Nora learns from family friend Damien, (who by the way, has a thing for Nora and is dying), that Neil has been released after serving 18 months and has gone to Evan looking for a job. Evan and Nora have understandably different reactions to this and it is not until the end of the play that Evan discovers what Nora did. In addition (this is a busy Christmas), Nora’s childhood friend, Christine shows up looking for a job after having fallen on hard times herself. All these factors collide early Christmas morning while the children are upstairs sleeping and the couple is faced to deal with what happened.

I found myself fascinated with the whole second act wanting to know how it would end. I did, however, find myself disappointed with the way the play ends. Director Bridget Kathleen O’Leary does a great job at directing a talented cast. She keeps the show tight and the audience engaged. Sarah Newhouse plays an interesting Nora coming across at times as confident and smart, and other times naïve. Will Lyman portrays Evan as your typical businessman, a husband who doesn’t fully get his wife and is great in the final scenes of the play. Kathryn Kawceki does an amazing job designing the interior of a beautiful house. Something I noticed a few times were the support columns, which divide up the set and are sometimes in the way of seeing the actors – at first this was a distraction but then I wondered if it might have been symbolic. Overall, this is a well-directed solid production of an updated classic.

Frank Furnari, New Rep Reviewer