Feminist Performance Art

 

[I’ve blogged a bit on performance art on Rick On Theater: “Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time” by Kirk Woodward (1 November 2011), “Performance Art, Part 1” (7 November 2013) and “Part 2” (10 November 2013), “Penny Arcade: Two Performances” (15 November 2013), “‘The Second Life of Performance’” by Katie Kitamura (10 January 2016), and “‘Art That Flows From a Will to Live’: Marina Abramović, Performance Artist” by Jessica Testa (7 September 2024). 

[The reason there’s not more is that, frankly, it’s not a subject about which I know a great deal.  (My appreciation of performance art is more for what its innovations and experimentation contribute to more conventional theater than for the live art itself that the artists make.) 

[However, when I read the article below on the revival, so to speak, of interest in the feminist performance artists of the late-middle 20th century, my attention was piqued.  I decided it was more than worth sharing with ROTters; I hope you’ll agree when you read it yourselves.] 

“THE RADICALS”
by Amanda Fortini

[The article below, published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026, was also posted on the Times website as “Is Yoko Ono Still Our Most Radical Artist?” on 30 April.]

A crop of recent exhibitions prove how feminist performance art from the 1960s and ’70s is more relevant than ever.

In March 1965, almost two years before she’d meet John Lennon [1940-80] and form their infamous alliance, Yoko Ono [b. 1933] staged “Cut Piece,” a groundbreaking work of performance art, at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. It was the third presentation of the work (the first two were staged in Kyoto and Tokyo in the summer of 1964), but this one was filmed by the documentarians David [1931-87] and Albert Maysles [1926-2015] and has thus been preserved for posterity as a nine-minute black-and-white film. Ono, then an avant-garde artist known for her involvement in the Fluxus movement, sits impassively onstage next to a pair of fabric shears. She is dressed in clothes of obvious quality (an elegant black sweater suit with pearl buttons, a silk slip underneath, fishnet pantyhose), which members of the audience, strangers to the artist, are invited to approach and snip off.

[A very brief bio of Yoko Ono: Ono, an artist, musician, activist, filmmaker, and performance artist, was born in Tokyo. Her father was a wealthy banker and, during Ono’s early years, was transferred to bank branches all over the world, including San Francisco (1933, two weeks before his daughter’s birth), New York City (1940), and Hanoi (1941).

[In 1945, after World War II, Ono’s father moved to Scarsdale, New York, but Ono remained in Japan until 1952, when she joined her family. She enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, where, among other subjects, she studied music composition. She became interested in twelve-tone music and then moved into the “avant-garde.”

[In the ’50s and ’60s, Ono lived an eventful life, including two marriages, the birth of a daughter, and exploration with music and art of a decidedly experimental nature. She exhibited and performed in several venues. She came to London in September 1966 and met John Lennon in November at an exhibit of her conceptual art. He was intrigued by her art, and in September 1967, Lennon, who was still married to his first wife at the time, sponsored her solo show at a London gallery.

[Lennon’s first marriage was terminated in November 1968, and he and Ono collaborated on a number of works during the last two years of the Beatles, 1969 and ’70, and attended many public protests against the war in Vietnam. The couple married in March 1969. They had formed the Plastic Ono Band in 1968 as an outlet for their collaborative work.

[Ono and Lennon moved to New York City to escape the press attention, especially the racial prejudice in the media directed at Ono, in August 1971. They initially settled in Greenwich Village, but moved to the Dakota Apartments on the Upper West Side on Central Park West, between 72nd and 73rd Streets, in 1973.

[On 8 December 1980, Lennon, returning home with Ono after a recording session, was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who remains in prison on a 20-years-to-life sentence.

[Ono continues to perform, exhibit, and release recordings. She appears for, promotes, and supports many charitable, artistic, and humanitarian works and organizations around the world. She also works to preserve her murdered husband and collaborator’s legacy, having funded the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan’s Central Park in his memory in 1981-85, along with other memorials to Lennon.

[In 2005, as keeper of the Lennon flame, Ono was actively involved as a primary consultant to Lennon, a musical about the post-Beatles life of the rock songwriter with music and lyrics by Lennon and book by Don Scardino (b. 1949; retired actor; television director and producer).

[Ono made the whole Lennon catalog available to Scardino. The gatekeeper to the Lennon legacy, Ono retained final script approval and required the Broadway producers to present the completed script to her live in workshop format.

[The show went into previews on 7 July 2005 at the Broadhurst Theatre, opened 14 August to negative reviews, and closed on 24 September after 42 previews and 49 regular performances.]

At first, the audience-perpetrators are reticent and even polite, cutting bits from her sleeves and collar and waistband, then setting the shears back on the stage, as Ono stares ahead unperturbed. Eventually, though, an overzealous man saunters up and begins slicing off Ono’s slip with gusto, first cutting directly between her breasts, then snipping the slip’s arm straps and finally slicing all the way around her waist to reveal her bra. The audience titters with nervous laughter (“Don’t get carried away,” a female voice admonishes), while the artist herself begins to look uncomfortable, biting her lip, her eyes darting around. Only when the man clips Ono’s bra straps does the audience protest. “Stop being such a dweeb!” a female voice yells, breaking the offender’s spell; others boo and hiss. “Cornball,” a male voice declares. Ono’s eyes tilt upward as though imploring the heavens for assistance; she crosses her arms over her chest. But she perseveres, and the film ends before the performance does.

“Cut Piece” — in its enactment of public violence, escalating sense of dread and implication of the audience as voyeurs — was a pivotal work of feminist art and would inspire numerous others: Among them were Carolee Schneemann’s [1939-2019] provocative “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which the artist pulled a scroll inscribed with an excerpt from her book “Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter” (“If you are a woman … they will almost never believe you really did it” [Tresspuss Press, 1976]) from her vagina; and Marina Abramović’s [b. 1946] “Rhythm 0” (1974), in which the audience was encouraged to interact with the artist using any of 72 objects set on a table (a rose, a feather, a whip, a gun) while Abramović stood still. “Rhythm 0,” like Ono’s piece, reverses the usual artist-audience dynamic. “Instead of giving the audience what the artist chooses to give,” Ono has said of “Cut Piece,” “the artist gives what the audience chooses to take.” Abramović, who had a loaded gun pointed at her, put it more bluntly: “What I learned was that . . . if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.”

Viewing “Cut Piece” now, what struck me is how genuinely unsettling it remains. I watched the short film once, then again, floored by how relevant, how prophetic, it feels in our own cultural moment, when many of the long-held gains of feminism, both legal and cultural, seem on the brink of being lost forever. The reality most people took for granted merely a few years ago — that men and women were inherently equal, and that as a society we were collectively striving to remedy the ways in which we weren’t paid or treated as such — is being peeled away with alarming speed. This atmosphere is surely one reason we are seeing a resurgence of interest in feminist performance art of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, much of it difficult, aggressive and surprisingly radical — certainly for its era but even now.

In the past decade or so, the defining trend among curators has been to shine a light on artists who were previously “overlooked.” Various groups who were once misunderstood, neglected or ignored have been excavated and exhibited — artists of color, older women artists, women of Abstract Expressionism and so on (though “overlooked” is, of course, itself a deprecating term). The “rediscovery-industrial complex,” as it’s been wryly termed, has now reached female performance artists, arguably sidelined in their day not only for the confrontational radicalism of their work — what Schneemann called the “considered disregard for the comfort of the audience” [The Obscene Body Politic (Carolee Schneemann Foundation, 1991)] — but because their particular art form was not salable, collectible or tied to the market in any way.

Ono, who has a new exhibition, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” opening at the Broad museum in Los Angeles next month [23 May-11 October 2026], is at the center of this reassessment, but she’s not alone. In July, London’s Tate Modern, where the Ono show originated, will mount a significant retrospective [Ana Mendieta, 15 July 2026-17 January 2027] of the work of Ana Mendieta [b. 1948], the Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who died in 1985 at 36 years old. The exhibition picks up where this winter’s comprehensive show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York [7 November 2025-17 January 2026], “Ana Mendieta: Back to the Source,” left off, examining her short but prolific career through early paintings, remastered films, late sculptures and site-specific interventions in natural landscapes, which Mendieta documented with slides, photographs or film.

[Ana Mendieta died on 8 September 1985 after falling from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She lived there with her husband of eight months, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (1935-2024). The circumstances surrounding her death were the subject of controversy.

[Prior to her death, neighbors heard the couple arguing violently and, after Mendieta’s fall, to which there were no eyewitnesses, Andre had scratches all over his face.

[During three years of legal proceedings, Andre’s lawyer described Mendieta’s death as a possible accident or a suicide. After a nonjury trial, Andre was acquitted of second-degree murder in February 1988. The acquittal caused an uproar among feminists in the art world, and remains controversial.]

Also this spring, Abramović, now 79 and the most influential performance artist still working — for “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA in 2010 [14 March-31 May], she sat staring at museumgoers for roughly seven hours a day over two and a half months, and has generally made testing the limits of human endurance her artistic pursuit — is presenting new and old work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice [Transforming Energy, 6 May-19 October 2026], the first living female artist to have a major solo exhibition there. And her “Balkan Erotic Epic,” a four-hour dancing and singing extravaganza that mines Balkan folklore, will have its North American premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in December [8-20 December].

[Before New York City, Balkan Erotic Epic (Abramović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in the Balkans) has played in Manchester, U.K. (début); Barcelona, Spain; Bochum, Germany; and Berlin, Germany. Following New York, the project is scheduled to travel to Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Paris, France.]

Last year, Karen Finley [b. 1956], 70, the artist known for covering her body in chocolate to point out the degradation of women [The Return of Chocolate-Smeared Woman, The Flea Theater, 17 June-4 July 1998] — but even more so for suing the National Endowment for the Arts for denying her funding over “decency standards,” a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court [National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, et al. (1998); co-plaintiffs: John Fleck (b. 1951), Holly Hughes (b. 1955), Tim Miller (b. 1958), and the National Association of Artists’ Organizations; decided against the artists] — had a solo show at Freight + Volume gallery in Lower Manhattan [More Desperate Than Ever, 17 May-5 July 2025]. Other female performance artists had posthumous exhibitions at various major galleries in New York and Los Angeles: Schneemann (who often used her body as what she described as “visual territory” in transgressive pieces exploring female sexuality), Lee Lozano [1930-99] (whose most famous performance was a satirical inversion of feminism in which the singular artist avoided speaking to other women for 28 years [Decide to Boycott Women, August 1971 until her death]) and Hannah Wilke [1940-93] (who made stark work documenting her nude body’s deterioration from cancer). Curators have made it their mission to rescue subversive feminist performance work from the purgatory where it’s long dwelled. At a time when manosphere podcasters extolling the virtues of female subservience are increasingly influential in public discourse, the constitutional right to abortion has been overturned and social media is rife with a kind of emboldened misogyny I thought we’d left in a bygone era, what could feel more apt than a group of pioneering feminist artists who confronted exasperatingly similar issues in their own lives?

There are perhaps no two artists who were as misunderstood in their prime, and who are more worthy of a critical re-evaluation now, than Ono and Mendieta, who have more in common than one might think. Both lived in the shadows of famous men, both existed between two cultures and both made conceptual work about gender, power, vulnerability, dislocation, connection, ritual and transformation — work that was deeply female in its sensibility, and that was about navigating the fraught space between the female self and the larger world.

The Broad’s Ono show, through drawings, films, conceptual art, music, performance pieces, installations, photographs and archival ephemera spanning seven decades, illuminates her immense contributions to culture — some explicitly feminist, some implicitly so. Putting a finer point on this feels like a necessary corrective, as her Beatles-adjacent celebrity has often eclipsed her art career. “She used her work and her music to communicate a lot of important feminist messages,” Connor Monahan, Ono’s studio director, told me. (Ono is 93 and no longer gives interviews.) “But in a way, I don’t really think that’s been digested in society.”

Ono, who was born in Tokyo in 1933 and received classical music training as a child in Japan, told her father — a classical pianist turned successful banker — that she hoped to be a composer. He replied there were no great female composers. Instead, she’d become the first woman to study philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, lasting only two semesters before moving to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College for three years and eventually finding herself at the center of the heavily male downtown avant-garde art scene.

Ono was making her early work amid the first stirrings of second-wave feminism; the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, combined with the publication of Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; American feminist writer and activist] “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, lit the kindling of widespread discontent among postwar American women. In the 1950s and early ’60s, women were expected to suit themselves up in the suffocating corset of domesticity. Until 1974, unmarried women were often required to have a male co-signer when applying for a bank loan or credit card. Abortion was only legal in a handful of states by 1970, and sexual harassment, though pervasive, did not yet have a name. It’s this unnamed menace, I’d argue, that Ono so cleverly countenances in “Cut Piece.”

Two of her short films from this period (both made in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade) address feminist ideas. In “Freedom,” Ono, whose face is out of the frame, attempts to wrest herself free of the purple bra she’s wearing while a score by Lennon drones on in the background. “Fly” zeros in on a fly crawling over the rolling landscape of a woman’s naked body. Is the woman sleeping? Dead? The ambiguity is intentional. “This whole idea of a male society was based on the fact that women shut up,” Ono has said, “but shutting up is death, in a way. So we were always kind of pretending to be dead.”

In Mendieta’s case, the death was all too real — she fell from the window of her 34th-floor Manhattan apartment; her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Frustratingly, her tragic end has become the salient fact of her biography. Helen Molesworth’s [b. 1966; curator of contemporary art] popular 2022 podcast, “Death of an Artist,” investigated Andre’s suspected involvement, along with the couple’s tumultuous eight-month marriage; the actress America Ferrera [b. 1984] has announced plans to executive produce and star in an upcoming limited-series adaptation of Robert Katz’s [1933-2010] luridly titled 1990 account of the incident, “Naked by the Window.” To a maddening degree, Mendieta gets treated like the Sylvia Plath [1932-63; American poet and author; known for the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar] of the art world. Her aesthetic obsession with blood and death and burials, with tracing the outline of her body in her iconic “Silueta Series” — a leitmotif of hers that unmistakably evokes a chalked crime scene — is said to prophesy her own death. Yet finally, with these shows, Mendieta’s mystical, powerfully haunting art gets its due.

Born in Cuba in 1948, she was sent to America with her sister at the age of 12. Mendieta made her most important work between 1972 and 1985: on creek banks in Iowa, where she lived in an orphanage, a boarding school and a series of foster homes as a child, then later studied at the University of Iowa’s avant-garde Intermedia M.F.A. program; in Mexico, where she visited pre-Columbian archaeological sites in the early ’70s; during a series of trips back to Cuba in the early ’80s; and in New York City, where she moved in 1978 and was welcomed by a community of feminist artists.

Mendieta’s varied oeuvre — influenced by Afro-Cuban religious rituals, Indigenous goddesses and the idea that a universal energy animates all life — includes paintings; photographs; works on paper; films of her pieces shot on Super 8, 16 millimeter and video; and sculptures she made at the American Academy in Rome, where she had her own studio for the first time, in the two years before her death. At Marian Goodman, there were drawings on leaves and an installation of black candles arranged in the shape of her body — called “Ñañigo Burial” (1976) [Ñáñigo refers to a member of a historic, Afro-Cuban, all-male fraternal organization], the installation was created by Mendieta for her first opening in New York [November 1979 at the A.I.R. Gallery (SoHo); Siluetas series]; it was lit the day I visited. But her signature pieces are her “earth body” works, as she called them, which are perhaps best described as ephemeral sculptures that straddle performance art, body art and land art, which Mendieta created using natural elements (mud, fire, feathers, flowers, blood, water, gunpowder) to carve, mark, burn or otherwise manipulate the earth. In “Imágen de Yágul” (1973) [“Image of Yágul,” a pre-Columbian Zapotec (indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished from ca. 700 BCE-1521 CE in the Valley of Oaxaca in southeastern Mexico) archaeological site and former city-state], for example, she integrates her body into the landscape, lying inside an ancient Zapotec tomb, her naked form obscured by a gauzy spray of flowers; in other works, she inscribes her corporeal outline into the landscape by igniting it with gunpowder, say, or setting it on fire. Mendieta staged many of her pieces privately, capturing them in arresting short films and photographs, which are artifacts in their own right — “the afterimage of primordial remembrances,” in her words. Mysterious and intimate, her earthworks make you feel like you are being let in on a secret.

Ono and Mendieta have something else in common: Their work, as well as that of nearly all the female performance artists of this era, was marginalized, demeaned or slighted. When she died, Mendieta had no formal gallery representation and did not receive an obituary in The New York Times, though the paper extensively covered her husband’s murder trial. Reviews of the albums Ono released with Lennon were harsh: “A little of it goes a long way. Too long,” wrote the Times critic Don Heckman [1934-2024; New York Times pop and jazz music critic, 1969-73] of Ono’s half of the couple’s dual 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” releases, dismissing it as “wailing vocal sounds.” Her visual art was ignored almost wholesale until the 21st century.

Surely a primary reason for this dismissal of both women is that their work focused heavily on the female body. The body is the performance artist’s vessel, of course, but first- and second-wave feminist art, especially in the ’70s, was also engaged in “a rethinking of how we represent the female body in all its forms,” as the critic Lauren Elkin [b. 1978; Franco-American cultural critic, essayist, novelist, and translator] writes in “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” (2023). Some artists made work that was in-your-face, like Wilke photographing a series of topless self-portraits in which she covered her torso and face with labia-shaped pieces of chewing gum that looked like tiny scars [S.O.S. – Starification Object Series, 1974]. These artists were, as Elkin puts it, “harness[ing] the power of repulsion” to make their point.

Others employed the body as a vehicle for interrogating themes of displacement and identity, which were particular concerns for Mendieta as an exile. “I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette),” she wrote in an artist statement in 1981. “My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source.” In her work, this return often means merging with the earth, as she does in the 1974 film “Grass Breathing,” where she lies beneath the sod, visibly inhaling and exhaling, like someone who has been buried alive. The three-minute silent film is claustrophobic, uncomfortable, intense, but also meditative, peaceful and almost erotic, masterfully taking the viewer through the full arc of emotions.

For these artists, the body, rather than being “mute” and “almost exclusively . . . a mirror of masculine desire,” as the [art] critic Jan Avgikos wrote in 1997, was, as it is in life, a site of liberation, agency, eroticism, pain. In a 2011 talk, “Regarding Ana Mendieta,” Schneemann, who was friends with the younger artist, said, “We have forgotten the danger, the dangers of depicting the explicit sensuous female body, we have forgotten how much hatred and resistance that inspired — rage, envy, domination.”

Have we? In “Moffitt Building Piece” (1973), Mendieta poured cow blood and viscera on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, then filmed passers-by, none of whom intervened. In “Rape Scene,” from the same year, she loosely re-enacted the aftermath of a female student’s rape and murder, inviting an audience into her apartment to witness her half-naked, smeared with animal blood and tied to a table. Ono and Lennon also made a film called “Rape” (1969), in which the camera relentlessly stalks an unsuspecting young woman; it incriminates viewers, just as Mendieta’s films do. Yet Ono’s most notable project in this vein is “Arising” (2013), for which she invited women to send stories of harm done to them simply because they were female, accompanied by a photo of only their eyes. Numerous testaments hung in the installation — a bracing reminder of the dark side of the universal female experience.

Is it fair, in the end, to group these female artists together under a feminist banner? Mendieta resisted any such identitarian designation — though her work was clearly invested in feminist themes, and justice for her death has become an article of feminist conviction. Schneemann was not fond of what she called “the confines of essentialist theory.” Lozano, in her absolute spurning of other women, was rejecting all categories imposed on her. Ono, for her part, cared about the plight of women, but the cause was a tributary that fed into her larger humanist aims. “I am a woman, and my experiences produce my works,” she said upon the debut of “Arising.” “To me, feminism should be about understanding women and their condition, about expressing who they are and what happened to them. If you put it this way, you see how feminism does not concern only women but everybody as humans. Also, men.” Although these artists didn’t always readily embrace the label, had they known how shockingly essential their art would remain over a distance of 40, 50, even 60 years, they might have seen it differently.

[Essentialism, which Schneemann rejected, is the belief that things have an underlying, unchanging nature that defines what they are. It argues, for example, that gender differences are fixed, natural, and biologically determined, rather than shaped by culture or history. This becomes a simplistic excuse for discrimination, intolerance, and inequity.]

[In 1992, I was approached by Drama Review editor Richard Schechner (b. 1934) to do a profile of The Shaliko Company for the planned series.  For the better part of a year, I shadowed company director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), attending rehearsals for the various productions he was directing. 

[The company’s main project at the time was the environmental production of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven—originally called Going to Iraq (and returned to that title after the 1992 staging)—and I attended most of the rehearsals.  The production, at Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village, from 17 September to 11 October 1992.

[Malpede had been working on Going to Iraq/Blue Heaven during the build-up to Desert Storm, and her response to the Gulf war had compelled her to write about it.  The playwright was, however, already contemplating another occurrence as the base of the drama: the death of artist Ana Mendieta. 

[For Malpede, Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January 1991.  Aria, a sculptor who serves as the play’s central character, is a sort of avatar of Mendieta.

[(It’s interesting to note that the actress who played Aria in Blue Heaven, Rosalie Triana (aka: Rosalía Triana. 1946-2023), had portrayed Ana Mendieta in June or July 1992 in Madre Selva by Alma Sanchez (b. 1947; aka: Alma Villegas) at the Galerie Lelong—which showed Mendieta’s work.)

[There are three posts on Rick On Theater that cover Blue Heven/Going to Iraq, and one more that’s an interview of playwright Karen Malpede.  For those interested, these are: “‘As It Is in Heaven’” (25 March 2011), “Blue Heaven (Going to Iraq)” in “Some Women Writers from the Archives” (10 July 2019), “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq) – Part 1” (11 May 2020) and “Part 2” (14 May 2020), and “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).

[Amanda Fortini has written for the New York Times (including contributing frequently to T), the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Paris Review, New York, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate, and Salon, among other publications.  She’s worked as an editor at Mirabella, the New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana.  

[Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing (PublicAffairs, 2008) and Best of Slate (Atlas Books, 2006), and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award in 2012.  After several semesters as a lecturer in journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s Greenspun College for Urban Affairs, Fortini has contributed articles and essays on Las Vegas, including several for the New Yorker, and an acclaimed cover story for California Sunday.]

'A Doll’s House, Part 2'

Of all the non-musical plays on Broadway this season, the one that seemed to have gotten the most hype, including buzz surrounding its eight Tony Award nominations, is Lucas Hnath’s Ibsen sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2.  This prompted Diana, my frequent theater companion, to want to see it.  Because of reports that plays weren’t doing very well at the box office this season—several had already announced early closing dates off disappointing results at the Tonys—we talked about going up to the TKTS booth to try to score seats.  This became more imperative once the Times announced that Laurie Metcalf, the Best Actress Tony-winner for the show, would be leaving it on 23 July.  So Friday night, 14 July, after passing on our original idea of going on Thursday because of the hot, steamy, and stormy weather prediction, we met at Duffy Square at 6 p.m. and got excellent half-price tickets for the John Golden.  We had a nice dinner at Marseilles on 9th Avenue (good food, but very loud—and we forgot it was Bastille Day, so it was also crowded), then walked back over to 8th and 45th for the 8 o’clock performance.  

(There was a really long line that stretched all the way to 8th Avenue, but I didn’t believe it was for DH2: the crowd was wrong—too young and diverse—and, as I said, plays aren’t drawing this season by all reports.  It turned out not to be for the Ibsen sequel, but I never confirmed what the people were lined up for.  The theater next to the Golden, the Bernard B. Jacobs, is showing Bandstand, which didn’t get very good reviews and was nominated for only three Tonys (winning only one), so I didn’t figure that’s where the crowd was heading.  But the next house east, the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is playing Come From Away, nominated for seven Tonys, including best musical, and winning for best direction of a musical.  It’s gotten a lot of hype and is family-friendly, so I’m guessing it’s attracting a long line of theatergoers.  That’s my story anyway.)

Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House famously ends with Nora leaving her husband and children so as to find herself, rather than be defined by her roles as a wife and mother (as well as another reason that doesn’t enter into the sequel—but which I’ll discuss in a bit).  When she slammed the door to the “doll house” and her “doll life,” many theatergoers in 1879 (and even later) were incensed by the blunt way it questions the conventional roles of men and women in the male-dominated society of 19th-century Norway (and much of the rest of the world as well), and the play caused a flash flood of controversy.  (There were riots when the play was published in Copenhagen, where it also premièred soon after.)  A Doll’s House, Part 2 begins with a knock at that famed door: Nora (Laurie Metcalf – Tony; 2017 Drama Desk Award nominee for Outstanding Actress in a Play) has returned after 15 years of absence and silence.

Anne Marie (Jayne Houdyshell – 2017 Tony nominee for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play; 2017 Drama Desk Award nominee for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play), former nursemaid to Nora’s now-adult children, answers the door and is stunned by the person she sees.  Nora playfully asks Anne Marie to guess where she might have been for the past decade and a half.  The former nanny says that everyone thought she’d died—or worse, become a prostitute or, perhaps worse still, an actress.  (What became of Nora after slamming that door in 1879 has been imagined before.  Larry Grossman and the book-and-lyrics team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a musical sequel in 1982 called A Doll’s Life which lasted five performances on Broadway under Harold Prince’s direction.)  Anne Marie guesses from Nora’s attire that her old mistress has fared well, but can’t imagine how she could have managed the harsh realities of a woman alone in society.  Nora explains that she’s become a successful author, but under a pen name, publishing divisive books that argue against the institution of marriage. 

A prominent judge whose wife left him after reading one of Nora’s books has learned who the writer is, however, and that she’s been living as a single woman while in fact still being married to Torvald, a situation that’s improper, and in some cases criminal, in Norway at the time.  Nora discovers that Torvald never filed their divorce papers as he had promised when she left and the judge now threatens to expose her and destroy her new independent life.  Nora’s come back to get her husband to sign the divorce papers—only a man can do so at will; a woman has to prove some kind of mistreatment or misbehavior—and Nora asks Anne Marie for help finding a way to solve her problem if Torvald doesn’t agree.  They are interrupted when Torvald (Chris Cooper – 2017 Tony nominee for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play) arrives unexpectedly to collect some papers he forgot that morning.  He’s stunned when he sees who is sitting in his front room and he sends Anne Marie away so he can talk with his long-missing wife.  He refuses to file  the divorce papers because, among other excuses, he’s allowed everyone to believe Nora had died and that he’d been a grieving widower.  To admit now that he’d been lying for 15 years would leave him open to public ridicule and opprobrium, costing him his social standing and, likely, his job at the bank.

It’s clear Nora will have to solve her own problem, and Anne Marie tells her the best way to find a solution is to get in touch with her daughter, Emmy.  Nora has avoided recontacting her children, feeling they’re better off not knowing she’d come back into their lives, but the old nanny insists it’s the only way she can get what she’s come for.  Emmy (Condola Rashad – 2017 Tony nominee for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play), a small child when her mother left and doesn’t really have any memories of her, arrives and makes several suggestions for solving Nora’s dilemma—including capitalizing on the general belief that she’s dead: Emmy volunteers to surreptitiously file a forged death certificate to make her death “official.”  She’ll even fill it out and sign it.  Nora, sensibly, refuses Emmy’s offer.  But when Torvald returns, badly beaten by a stranger on the street, he tells Nora that he had second thoughts and filed the divorce documents; he hands her a copy of the papers.  Surprisingly, Nora rejects Torvald’s gesture and tears up the document and declares that she’ll deal with the judge’s threat herself.  She gathers her belongings and once again, leave the Helmer house.

Hnath uses sparse but charged and often anachronistic dialogue in order to comment (says the promos of South Coast Rep) on modern marriage and relationships, distilling the story to its central characters (the two Helmer sons are merely mentioned, and, Dr. Rank having died at the end of DH1, Nils Krogstad, Christina Linden, and maid Ellen, are not part of DH2) and setting up a chain of highly fraught two-character confrontations.  In each one, Nora gets an earful of what her decision back a decade-and-a-half has visited upon each of those left behind.  Each character has her or his say about her decision and what she can or should do about her current dilemma.  The play’s intended to be a stylized exploration of the power conflicts in marriage, using 19th-century Norway as a metaphor for the modern West, and the complications that come with navigating entrenched resentments.  

Hnath, 37, was born in Orlando, Florida, but moved to New York City in 1997 to study pre-med.  He switched to dramatic writing at Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts in 2002.  A member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, he’s been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011 and teaches dramatic writing at NYU.

I don’t know Hnath’s work at all; A Doll’s House, Part 2 is the first of his works of which I’d even heard.  In American Theatre, Diep Tran, an arts journalist and associate editor at AT, asserts that “Hnath aims to disorient his audience so they are induced to think hard about the work they just saw, even after they’re left the theatre.”  DH2 suggests there’s some truth to that statement.  Hnath explains, “I’m interested in unresolved chords because of what they do to the head afterward.”  His influences include Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, and Caryl Churchill . . . and Disney—“for inspiring his love of the artificial and fabricated”: “I love good gimmick,” the playwright grins.  (He grew up seven minutes away from Walt Disney World.  One of his plays is named for the famous animator.)  In an expression that could come from Bertolt Brecht (whom the dramatist doesn’t name as an influence), Hnath says that in his plays, “the sound of thinking should be louder than the sound of emotion.  I want the audience to engage with the thinking, with the reasoning.” 

Hnath’s play Red Speedo, a play about the conflict between Olympic hopes and the ethically challenged world of commerce, was presented Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016 and won the OBIE Award for Playwriting and for the performance of cast member Lucas Caleb Rooney.  Other plays include Hillary and Clinton, The Christians, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, Isaac’s Eye, and Death Tax, produced by such companies as Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival of New Plays), Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, and London’s Royal Court, garnering Hnath acclaim and several awards and prizes for his writing.

A Doll’s House, Part 2 was commissioned by South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, where it was workshopped (with actors who gave Hnath input).  Hnath says, however, that “for a while” he’d wanted “to write a sequel to ‘A Doll’s House’” and began working on a script in 2014.  The playwright did research into the divorce laws of 19th-century Norway and read books on Ibsen and marriage.  He even contacted feminist scholars, some of whose names are listed in the program as “Advisors to Mr. Hnath.” 

Directed at SCR by Shelley Butler, the play ran in April 2017.  DH2 opened on Broadway with a different cast on 27 April 2017 after previews which began on 30 March 2017 at the John Golden Theatre (the productions overlapped, probably to get DH2 on Broadway in time for Tony eligibility); it’s currently scheduled to close on 7 January 2018.  (The production has already had one extension from 23 July, and there will be several cast changes at that date: Metcalf, Cooper, and Rashad will be leaving the show, to be replaced by Julie White, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Erin Wilhelmi, respectively)  The New York production is Hnath’s Broadway debut.

DH2, which runs an intermissionless hour-and-twenty minutes (the listing says 1½ hours, but it’s shorter than that), was pretty packed anyway, even though there wasn’t any line outside.  The audience was also very vocal—lots of big laughs.  Nonetheless, both Diana and I didn’t think the play (or the performances) lived up to the hype.  Neither of us could figure out why Lucas Hnath even wrote it; there didn’t seem to be any point aside from messing with a classic.  (The tech director in the theater program where I got my MFA called this kind of production—spotlighting some attention-grabbing gambit that has no justification other than to show that you thought it up—“Hamlet on roller-skates.”)

I have a problem with “sequels” of existing material to start with—it always seems lazy and unimaginative, and then the writer’s stuck with pre-existing conditions (if you’ll pardon the use of the phrase just now) that she or he either has to twist and manipulate to make them accommodate her or his “new” ideas, or ignore completely so they don’t interfere with the new plot or theme.  Then, if the original piece was successful—and we can pretty much agree that Ibsen’s DH fulfills that criterion—it probably pretty much says all that needs to be said on the subject.  In that case, why not write a new original play?  Unless, of course, you can’t—you’re not imaginative enough to come up with your own idea, like an art copyist or forger who can’t paint something original.  

So, that’s my prejudice going in.  And, sure enough, Hnath does ignore an (important, I believe) aspect of DH1 in order to make his play go.  (I won’t say ‘work’ because I don’t believe it does.)  In DH2, Nora has left Torvald and her children 15 years earlier solely because she feels trapped in her marriage (which Nora 2.0 says is always a snare for women, especially in a society that loads the deck against them anyway).  She left so that she could become an independent woman and live her life on her own terms, not as a reflection or appendage of her husband (or father, or the men who lead the community, like a pastor).  That makes her a selfish woman; her motives were entirely about her and her ego.

But in DH1, Nora 1.0 leaves not so much—or at least not only—because she wants to be independent.  In fact, in Ibsen’s play, she doesn’t mention that as a reason, though she does say that her marriage to Torvald is demeaning and false.  The reason Nora leaves her home—and, most importantly, why she leaves her children behind—has to do with something people, including Ibsen, actually believed in the mid-19th century; it was considered a scientific fact, and it’s all through A Doll House (and it’s in The Master Builder and, especially, Ghosts).  Nora believes that her crime (forging the loan document that precipitates the plot of Doll House) is a sign of moral corruption and that, first, moral corruption will have a physical manifestation (which is why Rank is dying of a spinal disease—because he lived a dissolute life as a young man) and, more important, that that condition will be passed on to the corrupt person’s children (which is why Oswald Alving in Ghosts has inherited his father’s syphilis—even though we know today a child can’t inherit syphilis from a father).  So, in Ibsen, Nora doesn’t leave for selfish reasons, but altruistic ones: she’s afraid if she stays, she’ll infect her children with her condition—so she has to leave the house and leave them behind to save them.  (She says to Anne Marie, among other instances, that the children will be better off without her.  I talk about much of this is my report on DH1 in “TFANA’s Scandinavian Rep,” 13 June 2016.)

In order to make DH2 happen, Hnath can’t bring any of this up.  Besides cluttering up the simple plot (which he then proceeds to complicate with add-ons contributed by each character to make Nora’s contrived problem insoluble), it would make Nora too noble for his purposes.  (I suspect it would also be too hard to explain and justify to a 21st-century audience without a lot of historical exposition.  Ibsen had Rank, Christina, and Krogstad as test subjects and models of this moral-corruption theory—which in 1879 was common belief anyway—and those characters don’t exist in DH2.  Although, Nora and Torvald’s daughter, Emmy, comes up with a solution to Nora’s dilemma which would require the daughter to forge an official document, repeating her mother’s DH1 crime.)  Aside from a kind of dramaturgical dishonesty, this omission makes Hnath’s play one-dimensional (which DH1 decidedly isn’t).  

In the end, A Doll’s House, Part 2 isn’t satisfying dramatically—and I haven’t even mentioned Sam Gold’s directorial idiosyncrasies (which fortunately don’t rise, or fall, to the level of his Glass Menagerie, Gott sei Dank—see my blog report of 8 April).  I also haven’t commented on the affected acting exhibited, especially by Metcalf, which I assume was also at Gold’s behest and guidance.  (The language in DH2 is not only contemporary to the 21st century, but it’s fairly vulgar—lots of F-bombs.  I wonder if Nora and and Anne Marie in the 1890’s would even know the words they use.  (The play is set 15 years after Nora walked out, making it around 1894.)  In contrast to the acting style and language, the costumes are late-19th-century; the set is chronologically ambiguous since there’s almost no furniture in the room—just a small table (on which sits a modern box of tissues!) and 2 pairs of chairs which looked like mid-20th-century “Dansk Design” Scandinavian modern.  (The program doesn’t specify a date for the setting, but the dialogue refers several times to the 15 years since Nora left.)

Continuing from the brief sketch of the set above, scenic designer Miriam Buether devised the most spartan of stage environments since director Gold’s almost-bare Glass Menagerie set.  A minimalist take on the traditional box set, the Helmer apartment has three egg-shell colored wall with elaborate moldings giving it a vaguely 18th-century look, accented with only huge (about 10 feet tall), brown double doors (yes, that door—the door whose slam was heard round the world).  There are no decorations whatsoever on the walls, and the furniture, as I noted, is sparse and anachronistic.  There’s also one large potted plant next to the doors, and all of these set pieces are against the walls so that the whole center of the stage is empty—except when the characters move the chairs in now and then. 

At  preset—there’s no front drape currently in use at the Golden—an immense lighted sign greets the arriving audience, lighted yellow letters spelling out “A DOLL’S HOUSE PART 2” hanging from the flyspace—just in case someone wandered in looking for some other show, I guess.  As the play progresses and each character gets a turn in the spotlight with Nora, large projected signs with his or her name are cast onto one of the blank set walls, explaining why they’re so white . . . and blank—all for the sake of four effects of a few seconds each.  Now, there’s a design coup!  (The lights were designed by Jennifer Tipton, a 2017 Tony nominee for Best Lighting Design of a Play, and the projection design was from Peter Nigrini.)  David Zinn’s costumes (he’s a 2017 nominee for Best Costume Design of a Play for the Tonys), as I indicated, are perfectly period-appropriate for the 1890s—though Houdyshell wears a cap that I love: it makes Anne Marie look like something from a Dutch Masters’ painting from a couple of centuries earlier.  (The production’s hair and makeup were designed by Luc Verschueren and Campbell Young Associates.)

I don’t usually have much to say about the music a production uses during scene changes or as the audience settles into its seats, but I have a few words this time.  Leon Rothenberg’s sound design includes preset music that didn’t seem to have any relation to the play or its themes.  (It was by female rockers, however.)  Not only is it rock ’n’ roll, but it’s loud and insistent; in fact, it seemed to increase in volume as curtain time approached.  Now, I’m from the rock generation, so rock ’n’ roll music doesn’t bother me in principle, but Diana never misses a chance to inform me that she dislikes that music so this exercised her from the moment we walked into the Golden Theatre auditorium.  It may even have increased her displeasure at the performance as a whole—or, at least, set her up for disappointment.  I have no idea, though, what the purpose of this anachronistic music or the degree to which it was amped up is with respect to the show.  I have to assume that Rothenberg didn’t make these decisions in his own, any more than Buether came up with the scenic design without input from Gold, so I put much of the responsibility for this choice on the director.

Gold’s directing, as I’ve hinted, is in line with what I’ve come to expect of him: pared down, minimally evocative of period or milieu, focused on the actors and the acting.  This apparently lines up as well with Hnath’s dramaturgy.  I’ve seen three previous productions of Gold’s, including one Encores! concert presentation (The Cradle Will Rock, report posted on 1 August 2013; the others were Annie Baker’s John, 1 September 2015, and The Glass Menagerie, 8 April 2017).  (Guest blogger Kirk Woodward reported on a Gold production of Look Back in Anger on 28 February 2012.)  John, of which I had other complaints, as an outlier: a generally conventional staging on a set that was so far from minimalist that it was positively cluttered.  Even the Encores! Cradle, however, was more sparsely staged than usual for that stripped-down series.  The granddaddy of Gold productions, though, was the recent Tennessee Williams classic, The Glass Menagerie.  Unlike that reinterpretation, Gold didn’t violate the text of Hnath’s play along with his revisionist setting.  Of course, I don’t know how much the director influenced the playwright with regard to revisions during the rehearsals.  (According to the few reviews of the SCR mounting I skimmed, there seem to have been some design changes, at least—the entire production team was different in California; I can’t tell about text alterations.)

I hinted earlier that the acting in A Doll’s House, Part 2 is “affected.”  I don’t mean to suggest that it’s some form of “eccentric” acting, something highly stylized and choreographed.  But the actors, especially Metcalf, moved and posed in ways that called to mind 20th-  and 21st-century people more than women and men from the 1890s.  Now, Gold and Hnath’s intention clearly isn’t to update Ibsen’s play—at least not entirely—since they made a stab a dressing the characters in period-invoking clothes.  From what I’ve learned of Hnath’s playwriting, he mixes contemporary elements with period or regional ones because he wants to conflate the past and the present so that the audience thinks about both at the same time.  Some of Hnath’s language isn’t out of place for the play’s period—which makes the anachronistic expressions all the more noticeable. 

For the same reason, the modern movements and gestures of the actors jar and call attention to themselves.  This goes as well for the frequency with which actors, again particularly Metcalf, come down to the edge of the stage to deliver speeches.  They’re not addressing the audience—their focus is somewhere on the back wall of the house and the speech is more like old-fashioned soliloquies—so neither Diana nor I could see what this gambit was about.  Is it Gold’s intention to  make these actions self-referential, to shine a spotlight on his own directing?  Is it just the director’s ego—that Hamlet-on-roller-skates impetus?  (If this is so, I wonder how Hnath feels about his collaborator’s efforts.)

As Torvald, Chris Cooper is pretty much wasted in this production.  This isn’t the actor’s fault, and not so much Gold’s, either, as Hnath has written Nora’s estranged husband as a sort of human backboard: he’s there for Nora to knock forehands against and to send them back just as hard.  His decision to acquiesce to Nora’s request in the end is almost a dues ex machina and seems like a playwright’s decision so he can end a play which would otherwise go round and round endlessly.  Cooper does well enough with the assignment, but he can’t make this Torvald an interesting or engaging figure.  (To be fair, Ibsen’s Torvald isn’t all that sparkling a role, either—but we’re not talking about that Torvald.)  In the vicinity of Metcalf’s Nora and Houdyshell’s Anne Marie, he can’t help but shrink in stage stature—which is ironic considering how important he is in all their lives. 

Houdyshell’s former nanny is doughty and commanding in her own way—a servant who knows all the secrets and all the hot buttons.  I couldn’t tell if it’s the actress or the character who was uncomfortable with Hnath’s obscenities, but it seemed odd coming out of her mouth.  (Not a problem with Metcalf’s Nora, except for the matter of its anachronism.)  She raised Nora, then her children, and now she looks after Torvald, alone in the house.  No wonder Nora comes to her for help—even if she can’t provide it.  (That’s not terribly surprising: Hnath devised a problem for Nora that has no solution.  It’s part of his dramaturgy and he fulfills his mission here.)  Houdyshell’s Anne Marie is a sort of an early-21st-century vision of a late-19th-century servant in the mold of the mid-20th-century housekeeper Hazel played by Shirley Booth on TV—the one that keeps everything spinning in the right direction and everyone on the right path.

Daughter Emmy is only slightly more integral to the set-up than Torvald, and Condola Rashad (daughter of actress Phylicia Rashad) makes the most of the role.  She has the irrepressibility of a teenager and the imagination of her mother, the writer (though Emmy says she seldom reads).  Her outlandish plan to solve her mother’s problem has all the hallmarks of an adolescent who hasn’t developed impulse control yet.  (Emmy, the youngest Helmer child, would, in fact, probably still be a teen.  Rashad is actually 30, so there’s little doubt this is acting.)  If anything, she’s too much a modern teenager—but that would be Hnath’s and Gold’s plan, I’m sure.

That brings us to Laurie Metcalf and Nora.  Metcalf’s performance is the showcase for Hnath’s and Gold’s theatrical styles, which largely seem to come together in A Doll’s House, Part 2.  She’s a mix of contemporary womanhood and 19th-century proto-feminism. I can’t say she made it work for me, but Metcalf concocts a blend of the period-appropriate and the anachronistic that almost seems natural.  Perhaps blend is the wrong image—it’s more like a mosaic or a patchwork quilt: the elements remain discrete but form an integrated picture.  Metcalf’s Nora exists in two universes at the same time: ours and Hnath’s and Gold’s vision of Ibsen’s—but the modern one dominated.  It wasn’t a thoroughly satisfying performance for me (or Diana, from her reaction), but it was an accomplishment as an actor.

Ninety percent of Show-Score’s 59 published reviews (as of 17 July) were positive, leaving 7% mixed notices and 3% negative.  The average score on the site was 83 with a high score of 100 (Front Row Center), followed by one 98 and six 95’s (including Time Out New York); the lowest rating was a single 30 (Wall Street Journal), backed by a single 45--the site’s only two negative notices.  My review round-up will cover 27 publications.

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness declared that “A Doll’s House, Part 2 doesn’t have anything particularly original to say on the subject” of “[l]ove and marriage [as] a casualty-strewn battlefield.”  (The FT reviewer added, “That old controversy acquires contemporary resonance thanks to the profanity-strewn American vernacular.”)  “A puckish Laurie Metcalf invests an opening tirade on this theme with plenty of abrasive charm while Jayne Houdyshell offers barbed rejoinders as the long-suffering maid Anne Marie,” acknowledged McGuinness, but the play “soon runs out of ideas after the rhetorical fireworks of Nora and Anne Marie’s initial exchanges.”  Cooper’s “ponderous Torvald . . . is tepid” and Rashad’s Emmy “gets plenty of laughs” though her “dialogue sounds overwritten.”  The review-writer also complained about Gold’s “decontextualised staging, which blends period costumes with a stripped-down, nondescript set resembling a business hotel or conference centre.”  McGuinness’s main objection, however, was that the “sense of speechifying artifice frequently resurfaces throughout Hnath’s play, which fails to replicate Ibsen’s talent for integrating ideas and exposition.”  He warned that Hnath has “cannily preserved” Ibsen’s “most famous title, thereby appealing to theatregoers who might not usually be drawn to a piece of new writing.” 

Alexis Soloski of the U.S. edition of the Guardian characterized DH2 as “less a conventional sequel than a thought experiment,” adding, “Luckily, Hnath . . . is no mean thinker.”  Soloski continued, “Provocatively, the play functions as both homage and riposte, casting a critical eye on Nora’s choices and trying to wrestle with their consequences.”  Suggesting that the play’s description might “make the play sound rather dry and intellectual,” the Guardian reviewer asserted, “It isn’t.  Hnath writes fast, vibrant dialogue—much of it in a salty, modern vernacular—and while Gold inserts a few postmodern touches, he mostly pushes the actors onstage and has them talk things over with hustle and vigor.”  Soloski dubbed the cast “excellent, particularly Metcalf,” adding special praise for her iniial entrance, “a gripping concatenation of anticipation, anxiety, pleasure, nostalgia, and probably some other things, too.”  Metcalf “nearly makes you forget than the play succeeds far better as a vivid and playful philosophical exercise than as a character-driven drama,” she affirmed, observing, though, that “Ibsen managed both, but that’s a high bar.”  Soloski quipped that “most audience nails will go unbitten,” but concluded, “This shouldn’t put ticket buyers off.  The play’s sophisticated arguments about what we owe to ourselves and to each other, about how liberation can become illiberal are welcome mat enough.”  Her final recommendation?  “Step in.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley, dubbing A Doll’s House, Part 2 a “smart, funny and utterly engrossing new play,” declared that Hnath’s “audaciously titled” work “features a magnificent Laurie Metcalf leading one of the best casts in town.”  The Timesman reported that Metcalf’s performance is “exquisitely poised between high comedy and visceral angst” and Houdyshell is “fabulous as usual.”  Far from being “just a bright quick-sketch concept” or “hubristic project with the humility and avidity of an engaged Everyreader,” DH2 “gives vibrant theatrical life to the conversations that many of us had after first reading or seeing its prototype.”  Advising that Hnath’s post-modernities “may sound too wise guy for words,” Brantley assured us that the playwright “has a deft hand for combining incongruous elements to illuminating ends.”  What the Times reviewer asserted Hnath has written isn’t “a feminist play.  Or an anti-feminist play”—it’s “an endlessly open debate.  Which for the record never feels like a debate.”  In Gold’s “fine, sensitive production” with “the emotional commitment of the cast,” the “unexpectedly rich sequel” depicts a cast of characters, each of whom “is very much a living individual—a solipsist, as we all are, with his or her own firm and self-serving view of things.”

Terry Teachout started his review of A Doll’s House, Part 2 in the Wall Street Journal by stating: “Hugh Kenner defined conceptual art as that which, once described, need not be experienced.  Lucas Hnath’s ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ comes perilously close to filling that bill.”  He described the production as “90 melodramatic minutes” which Gold has directed “with ostentatious austerity.”  I generally dislike quoting a review at length, but in this instance Teachout (whose notice received Show-Score’s lowest rating) lays out his whole argument in a couple of paragraphs:

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” is an exercise in what I call the theater of concurrence, whose practitioners assume that their audiences already agree with them about everything.  The success of such plays is contingent on the exactitude with which they tell their viewers what they want to hear.  To be sure, Mr. Hnath flirts with ambiguity and crams his script with attempts at ironic comedy, all of it tiresomely facetious (Nora’s aging ex-housekeeper, played by Jayne Houdyshell, says “shit” and “f—” even though it’s 1894).  Nevertheless, we are never allowed to seriously doubt that Nora was right to abandon her family for the sake of her own happiness.  The result is a poorly crafted play—I can’t remember when I last sat through a lumpier exposition—that is not a risky challenge to established belief but a collective celebration of an article of firmly settled faith.  “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is tensionless: We know going in what we’re supposed to think of Nora, and we know we won’t be asked to change our minds about her.  That’s why it’s being performed on Broadway by Ms. Metcalf, Mr. Cooper, Ms. Houdyshell and Condola Rashad instead of in a black-box theater by nobody in particular.

Teachout also has complaints about the Ibsen original which impact his view of DH2:

Incidentally, when did you last see “A Doll’s House, Part 1”?  It hasn’t played Broadway for 20 years, and there’s a reason for that, which is that it’s a bomb that’s already gone off, a moldering landmark whose time has come and gone.  We live with its consequences—we know them well—but the play itself is a turgid piece of bourgeois-baiting that is now of purely antiquarian interest.  As the saying goes, it’s history.  This matters because “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is a sequel, one that makes sense on its own but is still vampirishly dependent on Ibsen’s play for its dramatic effect.  If you’ve never heard Nora slam that famous door, then you won’t hear its metaphorical echo in Mr. Hnath’s play.  All that he offers in its place is the droning therapy-speak of a writer who doesn’t know what to do with words other than line them up in a row: “Once I could hear my voice, I could think of things that I wanted that had nothing to do with what anyone else wanted.”

(I should remark here that, as ROTters know—and as I noted earlier—I have seen a recent revival of DH1: at Theatre for a New Audience in June 2016.  I don’t share Teachout’s disparagement of the play.)  Theatergoers who attended A Doll’s House, Part 2, the WSJ reviewer asserted, “got their money’s worth,” saving lavish praise for Cooper’s work.  He compared Hnath’s play, however, with the current musical Waitress, observing that DH2 “is the ‘serious’ counterpart of ‘Waitress,’ which preaches pretty much the same sermon, only with songs and dances added.”  Teachout’s final word on the play: “Yes, ‘Waitress’ is as thuddingly predictable as ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2,’ but at least you can tap your foot to it.”

In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz labeled DH2 a “compact and provocative comedy” which “pick’s up” after Ibsen’s original “[w]hether or not you think the story needed to continue.”  He asserted that the “fast-[p]aced” production, “which plays Nora’s situation very much as comedy,” is Hnath’s “best work to date.”  The characters each raise “serious subjects” which “aren’t new but presented in intriguing ways.”  In Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday, she dubbed the play a “[d]azzling, droll sequel to Ibsen’s ‘Doll’s House’” and pronounced it “a psychologically serious, deliciously amusing tragicomedy” which ended the current Broadway season “with dazzling theatrical fireworks.”  The production is  “surprisingly breezy” in Gold’s “stark, audacious, daringly acted” staging.  Praising the cast for “trenchant” performances, Winer also touted Hnath’s “twisty, devious plot.” 

For New York, Jesse Green (in his last review for the magazine), labeled DH2 a “thrilling imaginary sequel” to Ibsen’s original, “at its core a public forum on questions of marriage that still bedevil us.”  Green assured us, “Though he is deeply interested in argument . . . Hnath provides enough ingenious structure to allow A Doll’s House, Part 2 to function quite smoothly as an often hilarious puzzle drama.”  Complimenting the whole cast, Green praised Metcalf and Houdyshell especially.  Further, he argued, “Hnath is not using the preexisting characters and their backstory (let alone the real woman — a friend — on whom Ibsen based the tale) as ways of avoiding having to create something original; rather, they are springboards to something very new indeed.”  In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold asserted that the play’s “deadpan title announces both Hnath’s serious intent and his flat-affect postmodern comic sense.”  Feingold, however, confirmed, “There will be no fancy writing here, and no self-consciously spoofy striving for laughs. . . .  Hnath also eschews any updating.”  The Voice reviewer found the script “both powerfully dense and elegantly sparse.  Ideas seem to shoot off in all directions.”

Dubbing the play “invigorating,” the New Yorker’s Hilton Als described A Doll’s House, Part 2 as “an irresponsible act—a kind of naughty imposition on a classic, which, in addition to investing Ibsen’s signature play with the humor that the nineteenth-century artist lacked, raises a number of questions.”  Als affirmed, “To go from dreaming about Nora’s life to writing it required a leap of faith—an author’s faith in his own imagination—and that’s the kind of energy that jumps out at you from Hnath’s play.”  It’s “a kind of metafiction,” the New Yorker writer asserted.  “‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ is a play about a play, and about men looking at women—though not condescendingly, or with anything approaching lust and, thus, the idea of possession.”  Als praises the women in the cast, but laments that “Cooper’s passive-aggressive energy, sublime on film, gets swallowed up by the powerful actresses around him.” 

In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman described DH2 as “lucid and absorbing” and a “taut sequel” which “is about airing things out.”  The new play is “[m]odern in its language, mordant in its humor and suspenseful in its plotting,” continued the man from TONY, and Gold’s “exemplary direction keeps you hanging on each turn of argument and twist of knife.”  He concluded, “Everything about the production works. It’s a slam dunk.”  Maya Stanton of Entertainment Weekly observed, “You wouldn’t think that a continuation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House . . . would be funny, but humor abounds in playwright Lucas Hnath’s creative sequel.”  Gold’s direction has “a natural quality” and “the actors toss off their lines with a modern familiarity and nonchalance that belies the hard work behind such a comfort level.”  Calling the play “[l]iterary fanfic of the highest caliber,” Stanton asserted that the play “is an irreverent yet respectful take on the source material.”  She objected that the script “may rely a little heavily on wink-wink, nod-nod references to the future that have yet to be realized,” but “it becomes clear that this is not your grandmother’s Ibsen.” 

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney dubbed DH2 a “spry deconstruction” and a “terrific new play,” reporting that Nora 2.0’s entrance “bristles with tension, provocation and unexpected subversive humor.”  Hnath’s “pithy sequel,” his “audacious Broadway debut,” “delivers explosive laughs while also posing thoughtful questions about marriage, gender inequality and human rights that reverberate across the almost 140 years.”  Gold has staged the “taut, 90-minute” one-act play “with stylish austerity and not an ounce of flab.”  It’s “as much an ingenious elaboration and deconstruction of A Doll's House as a sequel, and it stands perfectly well on its own.”  The “series of two-character exchanges,” Rooney affirmed, “have the energy of a vigorous squash match.”  The playwright, said the HR reviewer, “shows a superb knack for balancing humor—from the droll to the uproarious—with serious issues.”  The writer’s “lightness of touch . . . carries through”  to the performances and the director’s “zesty staging.”  In Variety, Marilyn Stasio called Nora’s return a “dramatic parlor trick” and observed, “Despite the modern idiom that Hnath slings around with gleeful humor, it’s amazing how women’s lives haven’t changed.”  Stasio asserted that DH2 “isn’t really a play, but a very funny and quite biting manifesto” and expressed “hope . . . that Hnath will put Nora’s futuristic views into some dramatic context.”  Though she had praise for all the cast, the Variety review-writer declared, “Metcalf is amazing.” 

On WNBC, the network-owned television outlet in New York City, Robert Kahn felt that Hnath is “mining . . . pain for comic gold in a star-studded sequel (of sorts)” to Ibsen’s A Doll House.  He reported that “Hnath’s dialogue is full of sudden eruptions of profanity” and characterized Gold’s staging as “minimal and trendy.”  Roma Torre, labeling DH2 “a neat little play” on NY1, the news channel for Spectrum cable TV, reported that the “compact 4 character drama offers no easy answers in a superb production that asks a lot of provocative questions.”  Torre believed that “Hnath’s stylized take on the Ibsen classic brings the institution of marriage into sharp focus,” but warned, “Don’t expect any judgments here as this very smart 90 minute play only seems interested in opening the door wide to your own interpretation.”  WNYC’s Jennifer Vanasco pronounced Hnath’s “splendid” play “deeply satisfying (and very funny).”  The characters argue about marriage, but, Vanasco reported, “in Hnath and director Sam Gold’s telling, none of them are straw men (or women).” 

On Theater Pizzazz, Sandi Durell pronounced A Doll’s House, Part 2 a “smarty pants sequel” and said that Hnath “thinks he has the answers.”  The dialogue is “sharp and intelligent” and Gold “brings it to sizzling life.”  Durell declared that Metcalf “is thrilling to watch and listen to.”  TheaterScene.com’s Ron Cohen, calling DH2 “boldly written” and “forthrightly entitled,” asserted that it “gives audiences something to celebrate.”  Hnath’s “elegantly provocative script” receives “an immaculate production” from Gold in the playwright’s “auspicious” Broadway début.  With praise for each cast member, the TP reviewer asserted, “A Doll’s House, Part 2 revivifies the old-timey concept of a play of ideas.”  Samuel L. Leiter, on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, states that the play “is always entertaining, frequently funny, and quite thoughtful.”  Then he added that “it’s also often unconvincing.”  By way of explanation, Leiter continued that “it’s occasionally hoist by its own cleverness” and gives “the impression of a sharp-witted playwright’s playful ‘what if’ exercise.”  Nonetheless, insisted the blogger, “Anything with Laurie Metcalf is worth seeing; to have her onstage throughout this play’s intermissionless 90 minutes is alone worth the price of admission.”  (Like most other reviewers, Leiter complimented all the actors.) 

Matthew Murray, labeling DH2 a “funny and insightful new play” with a “prosaic and provocative title” on Talkin’ Broadway, felt that the playwright “is more interested in twisting the familiar than regurgitating it.”  “The juxtaposition of the declared setting (roughly 1895) with our time also underlines important contrasts in how we’ve grown and how we haven’t,” Murray found, “and lets us view progress through two lenses simultaneously.” The cyber reviewer affirmed, “This technique glides rather than grates.”  The “somewhat uninspiring” set is “distractingly spare and clinically lighted,” but the cast is “excellent.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer characterized DH2 as “a completely original work, that can entertain and stimulate on its own.”  The CU reviewer assured theatergoers that “there’s nothing talky or boring here.  The talk is sharp, funny and ripe for exploding into high drama.”  The play, she asserted, is “as amusing and thought provoking as any sequel can get.” 

“The frenetic Broadway spring comes to a thrilling conclusion with the lightning-bolt opening of Lucas Hnath’s ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2,’” raved Christopher Isherwood on Broadway News, “a new play so endlessly stimulating that it could give audiences fodder for heated conversation until the fall season is in full swing.”  The theater, Isherwood asserted, “does not regularly present us with new plays of ideas—let alone comedies of ideas.  Hnath’s play fairly sets your head spinning with its knotty perspectives.”  While DH2 “is often mordantly funny, and the language is contemporary—Hnath’s play is fundamentally, and profoundly, serious.”  Isherwood explained that “for all its intellectual richness, this is not a dreary ‘they-loved-it-in-London?’ evening at the theater that will have you furtively checking your (proverbial) watch,” reporting that “the production is as much an engrossing entertainment as it is a theatrical treatise that stirs the heart even as it invigorates the mind.”  Gold directs “with his usual intelligence and incisiveness” and Metcalf “delivers what is easily her finest Broadway performance to date.”  In conclusion, the Broadway News reviewer stated that DH2 “is far too complex to be boiled down to a single apothegm,” but it “moves gently to a surprising, moving conclusion.”

On Front Row Center (the review that scored 100 on Show-Score), Tulis McCall opened her notice with a suggestion: “Here’s a timesaver for you.  Stop reading this, just for a few minutes, go directly to the phone or whatever ticket site you prefer and get tickets to this play.”  She declared, “A Doll’s House Part 2 is a stupendous creation in nearly every way.”  McCall felt, “It is the combination of empathy and bravado, clarity and uncertainty, resentment and hope that Hnath has given his characters that lets the play sneak in and grab you where you live.”  Under Gold’s direction, “This is a feast all around.”  TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart emphasized, “Hnath takes a massive risk in amending an essential drama of the Western theater.”  The TM reviewer, however, confirmed, “It is a leap that pays off in delightful and often hilarious ways.”  With “sheer clarity and brutality,” the playwright “raises deeper questions not just about a certain brand of feminism, but the cult of individualism that is so engrained in modern society.”  Director Gold “has led everyone in this cast to thoughtful and revelatory performances in an appealingly clean production.” “This is theatrical austerity done right,” pronounced Stewart.  In the end, he maintained, “it will be hard to walk away from A Doll’s House, Part 2 claiming that you have all the answers.”

Victor Gluck of TheaterScene.net labeled DH2 a “witty, funny and clever sequel” with a “stellar Broadway cast.”  Gluck found “that aside from being faithful to the Ibsen precursor, it has a decidedly modern sensibility.”  The “new story is absorbing and twisty, interestingly creating an entirely new set of ethical and social questions than was handled” in DH1.  DH2 “is a play of ideas,” and “the debate is always engrossing, always surprising.”  Nonetheless, the play “is quite funny in its Shavian way,” and the TS.net reviewer contended that director Gold “allows the actors and the dialogue to speak for themselves, rather than imposing any directorial touches.”  On Broadway World, Michael Dale observed that A Doll’s House, Part 2 is “a play that will no doubt provoke discussion, particularly discussion about the fact that a Broadway play that debates issues regarding a woman’s fight against institutionalized sexism was written and directed by men.”  Designating the Broadway staging an “invigorating production,” Dale noted that it “showcases four stellar performances.” 

Christian Lewis of Huffington Post pronounced the Broadway presentation of A Doll’s House, Part 2 “masterfully written and acted,” with Metcalf, “who is quite simply superb,” “[a]t the helm of everything.”  Lewis, though, found, “The largest problem of A Doll’s House, Part 2 is the ambiguous time period” which rendered the play “a somewhat confusing experience for the audience.”  (I suggest Lewis learn to speak for himself.  Having read over two dozen reviews, I can testify that many viewers had no problem with this mixed chronology.  Even I, who didn’t much care for the tactic, knew it was a coordinated dramaturgical/directorial concept.)  “That being said,” the HP contributor backpedaled, “it was still an incredibly enjoyable play” with “four powerhouse actors.”  In the end, contended Lewis, “the true triumph of A Doll’s House, Part 2 is its refreshingly feminist political message.”  The review-writer proclaimed, “Nora proves that women don’t need a man”—who remembers the ’60s aphorism “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”?—“and if for nothing else, this is an excellent reason to go see A Doll’s House, Part 2.”

In sum, I have to say I think the play’s a mess.  I understand what Hnath was trying to do from reading some analyses of his playwriting, but I didn’t find it viable in practice.  If I had to read about it afterwards, it can’t have communicated well on stage.  Furthermore, if Hnath’s examining the vicissitudes of modern marriage, even if he used a mock-up of a 19th-century one as a template . . . well, haven’t we done that in our theater (and film) for some time?   I don’t get the critical praise A Doll’s House, Part 2 received (it won only one of the Tonys for which it was nominated, which may be a warning) or the audience reception it got.  If I hadn’t had doubts to begin with, it’d have been a great disappointment.  As it was, it only confirmed my prejudices.  Fortunately,  we only paid half price, otherwise it would have been an expensive disappointment.

If you haven’t already seen DH2, I don’t recommend it.  I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it?

[A brief word about the title of Henrik Ibsen’s original play: The name under which Ibsen published his new play was Et Dukkehjem, Danish (the language in which the Norwegian playwright wrote) for simply “a doll house,” the name of the child’s toy.  The most common, and traditional, English translation is A Doll’s House, but some translators, especially American ones, prefer A Doll House, eschewing the possessive.  I fit into the second category, as readers can see from the above report, and there are two principal reasons for this decision.  The late Rolf Fjelde, the chief American translator of Ibsen’s plays, makes the argument that, first, the expression “doll’s house” is primarily British and became attached to the English rendition of the play by tradition because the British translation was the first English version to be published.  In the United States, we generally call the toy a “doll house,” and, just as I prefer to spell  ‘theater’ the American way, I prefer to call A Doll House by its American title.  (The standard German title for the play, by the way, is Nora.  Swedish film and stage director Ingmar Bergman made a 1981 adaptation of A Doll House which he also entitled Nora.  It doesn’t come with the complications of the English translation, but it’s also far less evocative.)

[Furthermore, as Fjelde also argues, Nora is the doll in this tale, and the Helmer house doesn’t belong to her.  That is, after all, the point, at least in part, that Ibsen was making.  She calls herself a “doll wife” when she explains to Torvald why she must leave, and she lives in a “doll house.”  So, for linguistic, possibly chauvinistic reasons and thematic, certainly logical ones, I’ll continue to refer to Ibsen’s play about the place of women in Norwegian society as A Doll House, except when discussing a production or script that goes by the British title (as I did in my report on TFANA’s Scandinavian rep).]