Reviving an 1879 play with a new degree of nuance
Chastain wasn’t eager to return to the stage when she was approached six years ago by Lloyd, an acclaimed director whose minimalist restaging of “Cyrano de Bergerac” captivated audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year.
They met through a mutual friend, James McAvoy, who had worked with Chastain on the indie film “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” and starred as the title character in Lloyd’s “Cyrano.” Lloyd asked her why she wasn’t doing theater anymore.
“I think my response was, ‘Oh, I’m too scared,’” Chastain said.
Over lunch, he convinced her to reconsider, then asked her to propose a play they could do together. By 2019, they settled on John Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” but learned that a version of the play was about to be staged in London.
Then Chastain texted Lloyd — what about “A Doll’s House?”
It seemed exhilarating, and risky. For more than a century, “A Doll’s House” has occupied hallowed ground, revered as thought-provoking theater that made a prescient argument for women’s autonomy. Ibsen’s heroine, Nora, initially seems naïve and dependent on her husband, but she becomes disillusioned with how he controls and belittles her. She eventually leaves him with what the playwright George Bernard Shaw described as the “door slam heard around the world.”
When it made its 1879 debut in Copenhagen, “A Doll’s House” was met with critical acclaim as well as condemnation, including from women. Nora’s decision to abandon her family was considered so shocking that some actresses refused to play her.
Over the decades, the character has come to be seen as one of theater’s most demanding and rewarding roles. Liv Ullmann was nominated for a Tony for her performance in a 1975 Broadway revival. In 1997, the last time “A Doll’s House” was staged on Broadway, Janet McTeer won a Tony for playing Nora. In 2017, the playwright Lucas Hnath won accolades for his brazen sequel, “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” which explored the premise that Nora (played by Laurie Metcalf, who also won a Tony) returned home 15 years later.
When Chastain and Lloyd decided that they would collaborate on a revival of “A Doll’s House,” they were aware that staging the play now — post-MeToo, post-144 years of theatrical history — required a new degree of nuance. Their goal was to jettison the baggage associated with the “A Doll’s House” and hit reset, Lloyd said. “The idea is to clear away all those expectations.”