DollHouse

Mix Alice in Wonderland with Ibsen’s landmark 1879 play A Doll’s House, and you get experimental theater company Mabou Mines’ DollHouse — the smash hit of last year’s New York theater season. Adapted by Lee Breuer, an Obie Award-winning “wizard-director” (The New York Times), this brilliantly inventive production casts tall actresses as the belittled Victorian women and under-5-foot actors as the overbearing men. Confounding proportions in the classic play about female subjugation in a male-dominated society, DollHouse takes place in a room with child-size furniture. The husband Torvald fits fine, while wife Nora must kneel and crawl, ingratiating herself to a small-minded man. With live piano music accentuating the melodrama and a puppet-opera finale proclaiming Nora’s liberation, DollHouse is “a passionate allegory that works — and plays — on many levels” (The New York Times).