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Dollhouse, by Rebecca Gilman
Based on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House
The Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, May 22-July 11, 2010
When I saw Gilman's Dollhouse at the Guthrie, I was both entertained and challenged, but I also had the feeling that little would stick in my memory. Yet I also had a hunch that perhaps this was the whole point of Gilman's play and Wendy C. Goldberg's direction: to show how forgettable it all is, the lives and times of Generation X. At least that was the hypothesis I wanted to test by giving myself time to read the play (Northwestern UP, 2010) and recall its enactment, while bearing Ibsen's play, its precursor, in mind.
When Nora in A Doll House leaves her home, husband, and children, we are led to believe that her departure is a point of no return, and that she pays a huge price for turning her back on the falseness of her marriage and her belief in the "miracle" that her husband would be her saving grace. If a miracle were to happen, she says at the end, it would be that they could be equal partners in a true marriage of shared responsibility. But for that to happen, Utopia would have to be a real place, and so Nora's last word must be "goodbye." Any salvation life might have in store for her must come from within herself, and to become a wife and mother in any meaningful sense, she must first become a human being. These are conditions of possibility, not of calculated risk, and they do not predict an outcome. They merely indicate this woman's need for self-realization and her willingness to pay for its sheer possibility with her life as Helmer's wife. Halvdan Koht has called the ending of the play an "inexorable calamity [which] pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics." Yet it is not a tragedy, for besides being open-ended, it presupposes both the desire and the idea "of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person," as Michael Meyer puts it.
Most readers of Ibsen's play have used such standard critical fare to understand and judge his Nora. But for...