By Patrick Maley | For NJ.com
A smart update of a classic, Two River Theater’s current production of “A Doll’s House” in Red Bank injects the play with modern resonance while celebrating the essence of this monument of Western theater.
Adapted and directed by Justin Emeka, the 1879 Norwegian play that is often credited with inaugurating modern drama is presented here as the story of a 1950s Black family in New Jersey, effectively and provocatively reenergizing themes and tensions that can seem distant in a classic telling.
Henrik Ibsen’s play focuses on Torvald (Joshua Echebiri) and Nora Helmer (Cara Ricketts), a young married couple with two small children and dreams of getting more out of life. As the play opens, that dream appears close: Torvald is promised a big promotion at the bank, and Nora is certain their days of scrimping and saving are behind them. She spends lavishly, certain that money will soon be of little care. He chastises her condescendingly. Throughout the play, in fact, Torvald assumes a paternalistic air over a flighty Nora.
We learn early on, however, that Torvald has recently been very ill and Nora credits herself with saving his life by arranging a trip to Italy. She first tells her friend Christine (Pascale Armand) that money for the trip came from her inheritance, but it is not long before Nora reveals the truth of having secured a private loan for herself from Nils Krogstad (Ian Lassiter), a man with a shadowy reputation around town.
Tension brews when Krogstad threatens to reveal Nora’s secret and potentially illegal dealings to Torvald, who looks down on Krogstad with disgust, lest Nora convince her husband to retain Krogstad in his job at the bank. Nora finds herself backed further and further into a corner.
It is in Nora’s increasing anxiety that Ibsen plants the seeds of modern drama. He introduces Nora to us as precisely the type of woman that Torvald sees: excitable and a bit silly, seemingly irresponsible and perhaps shortsighted. But Ibsen establishes this first impression of a flatly drawn wife and mother so that he can complicate and flesh out her identity and psyche. Nora has been crafty in the past by finding money she felt was necessary and protecting her methods from discovery, and the play wonders if she can find a creative way to avoid disaster again, this time hounded by the precise dangers she thought herself to have already eluded. Nora thus embodies the duality of a woman who must be the bubbly center of a warm household while growing more and more isolated and psychologically racked.
Emeka’s adaptation makes Torvald a Ghanaian immigrant whose promised promotion will make him the first Black manager at the bank. Nora is a Black American woman with a white father, whose portrait still looms over the fireplace in the house he willed to his daughter. Ibsen made Torvald an ambitious social climber who is never entirely certain of himself, but Emeka’s adaptation intensifies that anxiety, as this Torvald seems aware that any misstep will give white society just the excuse it would like to cast him out.
And when Nora reveals her secret dealings to Torvald, her father’s race effectively amplifies the potential danger. Emeka’s choice of the 1950s rather than the subsequent decade of the Civil Rights Movement means that Torvald and Nora are loath to make waves. This is a couple that has scraped out the acceptance and respect they desire, all of which is now at risk.
At Two River, Ricketts shines in one of modern theater’s great roles. Her gradual deepening and cracking of Nora’s carefree demeanor at the play’s opening reveals a woman very aware of the many faces the world expects her to wear. Nora is quite good at playing her roles, but Ricketts shows effectively how the character’s instincts for independence and control undermine her unassuming demeanor. The explosive final scene hits so hard precisely because Ricketts has shown us how Nora’s fuse has been burning toward its end throughout the play.
Echebiri is also excellent as Torvald, a character upon whom Emeka’s adaptation places greater demands than Ibsen does. This Torvald is a clear outsider driven by resolute dignity but constantly aware of the thin social precipice on which he stands. Emeka certainly does not absolve Torvald, but this version makes his motivations and anxieties more legible, all of which Echebiri captures in a rich performance.
Under Emeka’s direction, the full cast offers nuanced, insightful performances, much of which is effectively underscored by Caylen Bryant’s cello, which captures and projects the mood of the Helmer home as it vacillates from warm to worrisome to ominous.
In moving away from a rote version of Ibsen’s classic, this production of “A Doll’s House” has thoughtfully exemplified precisely what makes the play so lasting. It is a play that tests the limits of people under pressure. Emeka’s version updates those pressures while preserving the human desperation and resolve that defines “A Doll’s House.”