Mabou Mines DollHouse

Cayle Chernin's Blog

Mabou Mines adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House
Jan 30-Feb 4 at Harbourfront Center World Stage

From their website: www.maboumines.org :

Mabou Mines DollHouse transforms Ibsen’s bourgeois tragedy into high comedy with a deep bite. In the tradition of a series of award winning deconstructed classics directed by Lee Breuer, like Gospel at Colonus and the gender-reversed Mabou Mines Lear, DollHouse is on a political track that speaks not a word of politics.
Breuer turns Ibsen’s mythic feminist “anthem” on its head by physicalizing the equation of Power and Scale. Torvald, Rank and Krogstad, (the men), are all played by actors whose heights range from 3’4” to 4’5”. Nora and Kristine are tall and the maid is a full 6 feet. Nothing dramatizes Ibsen’s patriarchal point more clearly than the image of these little men dominating and commanding women 1 1⁄2 times their size in a “playhouse size” doll house. The collage of Edvard Grieg’s piano music assembled by Eve Beglarian accompanies each scene, silent movie-like, while Narelle Sisson′s mannerist set further skews our sense of proportion and reality.

It’s a stiff ticket unless you can get an Equity half price discount, but what a fantastic theatre experience, reminding one of what Theatre is really all about. I felt that Ibsen’s play has survived so that this production could transport us past the gender warfare and struggles for equality that has brought us into this 21st Century.

Almost indescribable is the effect of the tall women and the small men – small only in stature, as the actors rip the tiny doll house furniture to shredded wheat and gnaw away at preconceptions and even at what we think we know about the patriarchal system that has fostered the great divide that still clouds our lives and times.

To see these women fall to their knees before their tiny ‘gods’, machinate, baby talk and suffer at the iron whims of their oppressor/protectors, and finally Nora’s emancipation in a shocking operatic rendering of the last scene that is accompanied by a stripping down of the actor physically that underscores with a vengeance how we are shocked by truth and comfortable with ‘feminine’ artifice.

The production was so imaginative, the actors so committed and compelling, the lines reverberated with new illuminating nuances, that I was mesmerized and slightly removed emotionally I thought..until I realized that it was hitting me in a place of new emotional territory.. such an intellectual transcendence of proscribed thought, that even feminism cannot see beyond the patriarchal bonds of human mating that we are locked into…

At some point I felt like I was watching the oppression of Tall people by Short people and the insanity, hilarity and irony of that underscores all inequality making the worse bully an agent of our own willingness to succumb to the ‘manner born’.

How cowed we are by status quo’ted!