Dollhouse

EXTENDED THROUGH DECEMBER 14th

Mabou Mines presents Dollhouse, adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Director Lee Breuer transforms Ibsen’s bourgeois tragedy into high comedy with a deep bite. 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 nearly twice their size in a “playhouse size” doll house. Eve Beglarian’s piano concerti, inspired by Edvard Grieg, accompany each scene, silent movie-like, while Martha Clarke’s choreography further deconstructs melodrama’s posturing and evolves it into dance.