Susan Brantly’s playing a sold-out show at American Players Theatre in Spring Green this weekend.
No, the Scandinavian Studies professor won’t be striding the boards, brandishing a sword and speaking lines from a play. Instead, she’ll be providing important pre-show historical context to audience members who’ve come to see the company’s current production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Brantly’s afternoon pre-play talk will be delivered to a full house in the company’s indoor Touchstone Theater.
“I’m not used to sellout crowds,” Brantly jokes.
The packed house is a testimony to audiences’ enduring fascination with Ibsen’s masterwork about Nora Helmer, the wife and mother who walks out on her traditional family at the end of the play. “A Doll’s House” isn’t just one of the most performed plays in U.S. history, says Brantly. It’s also immensely popular in other countries, which speaks to the universality of its themes.
Brantly is in a unique position to shed light on “A Doll’s House.” Not only is she an expert on Scandinavian culture and history, but two years ago, she helped playwright Lucas Hnath by providing important background to “A Doll’s House Part Two,” the Tony-winning sequel Hnath wrote to answer the long list of questions Ibsen’s original work deliberately left unanswered. (APT is also staging Hnath’s play, beginning in late October.) Brantly and the playwright’s production company exchanged long strings of emails about life in Norway in the 1900s and about Nora’s likely legal status with her family and the possible career options she could have pursued. Given that Nora never divorced Torvald, her husband, he still owns and controls everything, leaving her in an extremely difficult situation.
Brantly thinks modern audiences will still be surprised by the role a woman of Nora’s class occupies in society.
“Nora is the angel of the house, the ornament in the living room,” says Brantly. “She’s a hostess. She determines the menu, but she doesn’t cook.”
In the sequel, Nora returns to her family having spent the intervening years as a writer. Brantly notes that certain jobs would have been impossible for Nora to take — things like working in a shop or a café, where she would undoubtedly have encountered men, breaking one of Norwegian society’s gender taboos at the time.
While APT didn’t ask Brantly to talk to its audiences about the sequel, she’ll be there to watch the company’s production next month. In a world that’s grappling with everything from the 100###sup/sup### anniversary of women’s suffrage to fallout from the #metoo movement “A Doll’s House” clearly still has sharp resonance.
“In many ways, this play is ground zero in the discussion about women’s roles in society,” says Brantly. “It asks questions with which we’re still grappling. Is this right? Is this fair?”