Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte | Don Giovanni / 2023 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

state of confusion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after a libretto by Giovanni Bertati), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer), Ivo van Hove (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Don Giovanni / 2023 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

Oh dear, those Belgium boys are at it again, Ivo van Hove and his partner Jan Versweyveld asking us to join the characters in moral judgment of the libertine hero who’s been acting up with what some have suggested, over the years, as simply the bad boy behavior of raping a few thousand women, cataloguing his conquests, and now killing off one of their dads who dares to interfere.  

     They certainly do take all of the fun out of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s dramma giocsco, as it was originally described, and which the Oxford Dictionary explains is “a comic opera containing tragic features.” These some thousands, along with the women of this story, Donna Elvira (Ana María Martínez), Donna Anna (Federica Lombardi), and Zerlina (Ying Fang) make for some mean “Me Too-ers” along with their fiancès Don Ottavio (Ben Bliss) and Masetto (Alfred Walker)—and, of course, the director and even more obviously his companion’s set design review the so-called comic opera through a new lens.

     The streets of Seville have never looked less inviting, with windowless mud-brown and pea-green lit walls, passages that seem to lead nowhere, and bridges that wind, circle, and cross in impossible-to-imagine spaces, evincing, as The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe describes it, the influences “the paintings of de Chirico and Hopper” and the “lurking staircases…[and] the winding labyrinths of M.C. Escher.” In an inter-act interview with Erin Morley, van Hove reconfirmed that Escher had been a major influence of Versweyveld’s design. In short, the world they create is a kind of inky noir not unlike those of the last days of the Weimar Republic.

      This is most certainly not a comic landscape—but after all the very first action of the play concerns a foiled rape and a murder of the young woman’s father, the Commendatore (Alexander Tsymbalyuk), not as a result in this MET production of some fancy sword play but with the cold machine of a gun. Only a short while later, moreover, Don Giovanni (Peter Mattei) lures another woman away from her own wedding.

      Even I, in reaction to a far more traditional production by the LAOpera I had seen more than a decade earlier, had described Don Giovanni’s first act as being somewhat like “an intense Western, wherein the hero’s luck has changed, as in a movie like John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, where everything seems to be going against the already maimed man.” I added, “Of course, Don Giovanni is not really a hero,” which in von Hove’s production so apparent that we need not even mention it.

     Indeed, I’d never before realized just how fully Mozart’s first act lays out the charges against Don Giovanni, one by one. We are witnesses, of course, to the attempted rape of Donna Anna and his wooing away from the wedding of Zerlina. If we needed even more evidence of Giovanni’s lasciviousness, we have his unhappy accomplice Leporello’s (Adam Plachetka) own testaments from the books Giovanni himself keeps about his conquests. And finally, we have the fury of one of his most recent victims, the almost foolish Donna Elvira, who convinced that he had all but married her before his abandonment, sings out her anger in “Ah! chi mi dice mai.”

     It is hardly surprising that in a world in which the wealthy Giovanni and his peers represent the controlling order of their society that Donna Anna demands her boyfriend Don Ottavio seek revenge by murdering the man, who she suddenly recognizes as Giovanni through his voice—visual recognition being nearly impossible in this world in which costumes and masks predominate. 

    If in many a production of this opera, Ottavio seems not entirely complaisant with performing such an act, in Bliss’ performance of the role, it is clear that he is ready to go along with her, gloriously singing “Dalla sua pace,” as he insits that such beauty cannot be denied its desires.

     As if we had not yet had enough evidence, however, Giovanni now throws a masked ball simply so that he might continue with his seduction of Zerlina, made possible by Leporello’s distraction of Masetto with a German dance. But Zerlina’s screams bring all the vengeful pack down upon the culprit, and by the end of Act I, we see the man cornered, ridiculously trying to blame his most recent criminal actions on Leporello. It’s all a cheap act, as hokey, we perceive, as the dozens of manikins openly placed by the opera prop workers in the windows to stand-in for the high society members supposedly attending Giovanni’s festivities. And we are nearly certain, accordingly, that this time the criminal will not escape.

     The first act accordingly, clearly shows us the evils both of Giovanni and the society in which such men exist, and firmly lays out the charges for his horrific behavior. It is only in Act II that any comic moments creep into to what we can now recognize it almost as the damnation of Don Juan.

     With Versweyyeld’s cityscape still in place, any would-be comedians and their machinations can only enter and exit through narrow pathways and creaky bridges. But amazingly Giovanni has done just that, escaped into a landscape wherein the smoky back and side streets he safely hides. As I mentioned in my earlier discussion of this opera, what amazes me is that this wealthy man, who might celebrate a life of pleasure within his own palace, spends almost his entire life on the streets like a mad homeless person looking for anyone upon whom he might prey.

     And he’s not very picky in his selection of women, for he now goes after Donna Elvira’s maid. But to get there, he must first remove her mistress, and to do that he brilliantly determines to put his accomplice Leporello on display, dressed in his own garb—as a century later Cyrano de Bergerac would voice his love behind a manikin-like cadet—with Giovanni singing of his renewed love for his Elvira in “Deh vieni alla finestra.” 

     That she falls for it makes us question her entire credibility, just as, soon after, we must once again question Zerlina’s devotion to Masetto as she tries to win him back for her now several encounters with the villain. As most of us have come to realize through today’s newspaper headlines and court-room hearings, women who have raped are nearly always subject eventually to doubts. How much, for example, were they involved in the sexual abduction? Even when we look back at the first scene, we recognize that Donna Anna’s attempts to keep him from escaping look somewhat similar to a woman trying to keep the rapist by her side. Even as witnesses, we begin to doubt her veracity.

      In this Act even the loyal Ottavio eventually begins to wonder when his fiancée will stop long enough in her determination to revenge her father’s death in order to show her love and marry him. Bliss demonstrates himself a consummate performer as he coyly draws attention away from her endless pleas for justice through what The Times critic Wolfe describes as his “added assertive ornaments to his arias,” which he found odd since “such ornamentation was rare among the rest of the cast.” Ottavio clearly wants some attention, proving it not only in his brilliant devotional arias, but moving off to sit down on the street and pout.

      It is in Act II, moreover, that we truly get to hear how suave and brilliant Giovanni truly is, the opera allowing Mattei finally to portray his vocal flexibility. In “Ah taci ingiusto core” and other such moments we truly come to recognize how even normally level-headed women might be tempted by his seductive charms. And given the state of confusion in which all three of the formerly determined females now exist, is it any wonder that Elvira spends nearly an entire evening with Leporello in disguise as his master, and the others, trying to track down the evil-doer are ordered by his own instructions to break up and move off in two opposite directions? Like the city as portrayed in the set, their world is mirror of illusions and, as they themselves begin to ponder, perhaps delusions as well.

      If human order is thus so disoriented, it is to the gods or would-be gods such as Satan that we must look for justice. The ghost of Commendatore also haunts these streets and finally chooses to appear before his victim when Giovanni, having failed to find a single woman with whom he might make love and being sought out by so many of the city’s residents for revenge, is at his most vulnerable.

      Yet even now, he cannot see what stands before him, although the only someone less deluded Leporello can. Terrified by the specter, Giovanni’s “other” recognizes him as death, reporting back to his master what he has witnessed. The hot-headed abuser challenges even the invisible pursuer to join him for dinner, demanding that Leporello pass on his invitation even to the world he surely senses represents a terrifying fate.

      Now doomed, even in his own vague bluffs, Giovanni retreats into the full infantility that his acts have always represented. At first, like Wolfe, I was flummoxed by the truly silly dinner scene at which Giovanni begins literally to play with his pasta, juggle his bread, and finally throw edible items at his friend before tossing over the whole table. But then one doesn’t have to have seen many adolescent food-fight scenes in the movies to realize what is at the heart of the great Don Giovanni’s bad-boy behavior. He is still a frustrated child who never grew up, raping women because he hasn’t a clue how to actually behave for more than a few moments in their presence.  But the real world has no place left for 60-year-old man with the brain of reform-school punk. The devil takes him straight to hell, no fire and brimstone needed in von Hove’s and Versweyyeld’s stark reality.

      As if, suddenly, order had been restored by the hand of God, the cold, dank streets of Seville quite literally break open to reveal their inner selves, a world of color, flowers, curtains, and other gentle flourishes of a welcoming city come to life as the sextet of Donnas Anna and Elvira, Zerlina, Masetto, Don Ottavio and Leporello celebrate in song.

      A new life is promised by all—although I worry a bit, given her new-found hatred of men and her still strong sexual libido, what Donna Elvira might do in a convent or, given his previous ribald adventures, how Leporello might influence a new master, or even how long it might still take for Donna Anna to get used to the idea that the world been ridden of Giovanni before she might marry her ever-loving Ottavio. I trust only that Zerlina and Masetto will enjoy the good dinner they have planned for themselves.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Stormé DeLarverie | performer of the Jewel Box Revue 1940s-1960s

being green

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Parkerson (director) Stormé: Lady of the Jewel Box / 1987

 

We have to thank Michelle Parkerson for capturing the important male impersonator and the sexual and social activist described as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community,” Stormé DeLarverie on film. Here she appears as an easy-going, intelligent force who in a brief moment with photographs takes us back to the time when she literally ran the legendary Jewel Box Revue, serving as its mistress of ceremonies in male drag—although she declares several times that she behaved no differently on stage than she did in actual life.

      She became the only female performer who introduced the numerous male drag impersonators of the Revue, basically managing its performances at the Apollo theater and its other venues, Maksik’s Town and Country Club, and Loew’s State Theatre. It was Stormé to whom everyone looked if there were any problems, and from the 1940s through the 1960s she basically ran the multiracial revue starring Lynn Carter, Robbi Ross, Leverne Cummings, Billy Daye, Dodi Daniels, Kara Montez, Kim August, and numerous others who performed, quite professionally and proficiently three to four performances daily, attracting large mixed-raced audiences of families and celebrity individuals in the days of segregation. The show, the forerunner of La Cage aux Folles, billed itself as starring numerous males in drag (in this period all the drag figures were referred to with their masculine honorifics of Mr.) with just one female, asking audiences to guess which one. Generally, they were stumped, particularly when Stormé added a moustache. In Parkerson’s film, Stormé observes that adult audiences couldn’t determine who was who, although the children in the audiences almost always perceived the gender difference, hinting perhaps that gender difference is not simply something that is learned but possibly innate?

     Stormé was particularly close to the headliner of the Revue, Lynn Carter. When his death was announced, she was so overwhelmed that they postponed the opening of the show for an hour, and even as she speaks about Carter in the film, she tears up and asks to move on to other subjects.

     Despite her reiterated strong sense of self-identity, at moments DeLarverie hints of years of oppression as a bi-racial lesbian who looked more like a man than woman, summing it up in a few words: “It ain’t easy…being green.”

     The performer also briefly expresses her admiration and personal feelings for photographer Diane Arbus, arguing that Arbus did not just frequent outsiders and freaks, but was a genuinely kind and gentle force who became a good friend of the singers. But no context is established the film, and it is never explained how Arbus’ photographs of Stormé in everyday male attire, but also in men’s three-piece suites and hats, had an enormous impact on gender-nonconforming women’s fashion long before unisex styles came into being.

   Unfortunately, the brief summary I have written above is more revealing than Parkerson’s documentary, which simply presumes we all know what Stormé is talking about when she mentions the Jewel Box Revue. Indeed, Parkerson’s documentary is so superficial that after her brief memories of her musical years, she immediately picks up with Stormé’s later life when she worked as a bouncer for several lesbian bars in New York’s Greenwich Village, here showing her working outside the doors of the famed Cubby Hole.

     We should also praise Parkerson for filming a full performance of the song “There Will Never Be Another You,” the Harry Warren and Mack Gordon classic, sung by DeLarverie, Even in her elderly years, the slightly waving baritone voice is something of a wonder. Stormé elsewhere has described her inspiration as being the singing of her friends Dinah Washington and Billy Holiday.

     What is rather shocking about this documentary of 1987 is not only that the director makes no real attempt to fill in on the details surrounding her subject’s life activities and passions, but fails to describe one of the most significant facts about Stormé DeLarverie, which one would imagine by the year of this filming would have been legendary. Stormé was a major, if not the central figures of the Stonewall Rebellion, as she describes it: “It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience—it wasn’t no damn riot.”

      Stormé’s The New York Times obituary summarizes the immediate years before her job at the Cubby Hole:

 

 “No one questions whether Ms. DeLarverie was there on June 27, 1969, the night the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, setting off protests that helped start the gay rights movement and are now commemorated during New York’s annual Gay Pride Week. But was she the cross-dressing lesbian whose clubbing by the police helped set the chaos in motion? Some witnesses have said yes, others no.

     “Nobody knows who threw the first punch, but it’s rumored that she did, and she said she did,” said Ms. Cannistraci, an owner of the Village lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson. “She told me she did.”

      Ms. DeLarverie was a member of the Stonewall Veterans Association and a regular at the pride parade, but she rarely dwelled on her actions that night. Her role in the movement lasted long after 1969. For decades she was a self-appointed guardian of lesbians in the Village.

       Tall, androgynous and armed — she held a state gun permit — Ms. DeLarverie roamed lower Seventh and Eighth Avenues and points between into her 80s, patrolling the sidewalks and checking in at lesbian bars. She was on the lookout for what she called ‘ugliness’: any form of intolerance, bullying or abuse of her ‘baby girls.’”

      The Wikipedia entry (relying on articles in The New York Times, interviews with DeLarverie, and other newspaper sources of the day, provides us with a more spectacular view of what that Stonewall night entailed: 

 

“At the Stonewall rebellion, a scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs, who may have been DeLarverie, was roughly escorted from the door of the bar to the waiting police wagon. She was brought through the crowd by police several times, as she escaped repeatedly. She fought with at least four of the police, swearing and shouting, for about ten minutes. Described by a witness as ‘a typical New York City butch’ and ‘a dyke-stone butch,’ she had been hit on the head by an officer with a baton for, as one witness stated, announcing that her handcuffs were too tight. She was bleeding from a head wound as she fought back. Bystanders recalled that the woman, whose identity remains uncertain (Stormé has been identified by some, including herself, as the woman), sparked the crowd to fight when she looked at bystanders and shouted, ‘Why don't you guys do something?’ After an officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon, the crowd became a mob and went ‘berserk’: ‘It was at that moment that the scene became explosive.’”

 

     How could a true documentarian dare make a film of this heralded gay icon without even bringing this subject up, let alone her many years of living in the famed Chelsea Hotel, or her later activities of working to benefit battered women and children? It appears that Parkerson glommed onto Stormé without really knowing her full story or even bothering to investigate further into her subject. While we can thank Parkerson for the brief portrait of this legend, it is difficult not to blame her for failing to fully engage her subject and fill in the information that might help the viewer to understand Stormé’s significant contributions to contemporary LGBTQ+ life. We might argue that Parkerson reveals that as a documentarian she, in another meaning of that word, is also “green,” totally inexperienced.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

 

Harold Pinter | Party Time and The Lover / 2026

speaking of love and politics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (playwright) “Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, Two One Act Plays: Party Time and The Lover / 2026

 

It’s always a joy to be able to attend longer or short plays by British author Harold Pinter, one the most notable writers of drama of the 20th century, winner of the prestigious America Award in 1995 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. The other day I had the opportunity to see two short plays seldom produced in the US, directed by Jack Heller at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles.

      The first thing that struck one, in this case, was a magnificent set by Joel Daavid, which helped to made the small open stage of the Odyssey seem like a vast proscenium production. The first of the two plays, “Party Time,” began in media res with the actors already engaged in quiet conversation at the formal London suburban celebration, the various singles and mostly couples moving around the room as they engage in drinks and talk.

                                                  Michelle McGregor and Brenda James. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

     The entering audience members, at least on my evening, seemed engaged in their own party-like conversations (the group behind me were constituted of what appeared to be a female theater-going clutch) until the signal of lights and announcement to turn off the phones, hinting at almost a kind of warring party-going, the situation perhaps creating an even more political context as the two sets of party-goers appeared each to demand equal attention.

      The 1991 play is actually one of Pinter’s most political works and one of his last plays in a career that became increasingly political as time went on. This particular short play was sparked by a visit Pinter and playwright Arthur Miller made to Turkey in 1985 sponsored, in part, by the Helsinki Watch to check out rumors about that country’s writers being tortured under its military regime. Attending a reception at the American Embassy, Pinter asked Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, an arch-conservative Ronald Reagan political appointee, for his assessment of the situation. Strausz-Hupé pooh-poohed his concerns, explaining to the playwright that he couldn’t possibly comprehend the complexity of the real situation. “There can be lot of opinions about anything,” remarked Strausz-Hupé. “Not if you’ve got an electric wire hooked to your testicles,” Pinter provocatively responded.

Michelle Ghatan, Paul Marius, Larry Eisenberg, and Mouchette Van Helsdingen. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

     In the party of the play, hosted by the wealthy elderly man Gavin (Larry Eisenberg), several of the invitees evidently belong to a wealthy health club, reacting in various ways to its exclusiveness and amenities. Terry (Paul Marius), obviously a man who has begun his life as a poor Cockney and worked his way up, is impressed by the warm towels, which reminds his host of the barber’s towels of old days, something Terry cannot even imagine or comprehend. Terry’s wife Dusty (Michelle Ghatan) seems to be the only one truly troubled by what appears to be a kind of revolution going on outside the mansion in which they are partying, asking time and again, against her husband’s attempts to shut her up, what has become of her brother Jimmy.

    But she refuses to be quieted, resulting in what appears to be promised violence even her murder from Terry upon their eventual return home. Meanwhile the elegant older Melissa (Mouchette Van Helsdingen) is outraged that her automobile was actually been pulled over and inspected on her way to the party. She totally stops the social chatter briefly to argue that nearly all the clubs she previously belonged to consisted of people who are now dead and had no moral principle as a base for their organizations. Finally in the Club, to which she also belongs, the organization, she argues, is built upon moral values, to which Terry crudely responds, that the Health Club allows no bad behavior, and “if they do [behave badly] we kick them in the balls and chuck them down the stairs with no trouble at all.” All of the guests attempt to get Gavin to apply for membership.

     Douglas (Christopher Louis Parker), as close to a Maga conservative as Pinter’s characters get, suggests that “they”—evidently those attempting to put down whatever revolution his kind are responding to—want only order, and as soon as it returns, everything will go back to normal. Obviously, he is speaking of “his” vision of order and the values of these empty-headed men and women. His wife Liz (Michelle McGregor) equally supports the causes of the despicable man she has married obviously for the power he pretends and the wealth he has acquired over the years. And finally, Fred (Isaac W. Jay) and Charlotte (Brenda James) smirk at one another, possibly in hopes of restoring the flame they once shared in a secret love affair.

      Brenda James, Michelle McGregor, Christopher Louis Parker, and Isaac W. Jay. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

 

    Almost all of them, while drinking heavily, declare the dreadful affair they are attending as being one of the most memorable evenings they have shared for a long while.

     But meanwhile noises, small explosions, shouts, and the sounds of sizable crowds continue at regular intervals from the world outside until the room suddenly goes black as Dusty’s lost brother Jimmy (John Coady) breaks his way through a window, bloodied from the street battles and wearing a T-shirt declaring his rebellious intentions. In his short monologue he gives voice to the suppression of the general population, revealing the lies and pretense of all the party-goers, an act that can only remind us of the seeming powerlessness of the general population today against the current illegal activities of the government. The rich may be momentary frightened, but they will maintain their power at all cost, if for no other reason of the existence of the Club’s hot towels and vague moral values that underlie all their pleasures.

      The second play, “The Lover” from 1962, is akin to the several sexual farces Pinter wrote during that period, including “The Collection” of the same year, the 1964 masterpiece The Homecoming, and his later 1978 work, Betrayal.

 Ron Bottitta and Susan Priver. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

 

      In all those works the central couples do indeed cheat and betray one another, mostly with vast if sometimes bizarre consequences. In this piece centered upon a suburban London husband and wife, Richard and Sarah (Ron Bottitta and Susan Priver), after 20 years of marriage seem to have found, however, full satisfaction in their lives by keeping a lover, in Sarah’s case, and by Richard’s having mindless sex occasionally with a whore. Richard comes home late from his busy days at the office to find a quite satisfied wife, while he, although forced to daily study his various charts and diagrams, seems to be perfectly comfortable with Sarah’s extracurricular activities.

     That is, until one day the bongo-playing lothario who twice or three times a week visits Sarah determines he is finally dissatisfied with their relationship, finding her simply too bony, and wants out; on the very same day, her husband returns tired of her extramarital affairs and forbidding her to see her lover any longer in the domain for which he pays.

     The slightly over the hill Sarah is suddenly faced with a disaster of sorts, her leisured life being threatened by the sudden demand that she play the role of a “real” wife, serving up dinner and attending to her somewhat boring husband who incidentally finds her lovely and plump.

      But by this time the playwright has made it quite apparent that this couple loves to play games almost as much as Martha and George do in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that, in reality, Richard is also Sarah’s visiting lover, she his whore. Now he, having locked her up in his castle, creates a very exciting prospect of an evening for his surprised wife, who must recognize herself as the whore to her husband’s romantic passions.      

     I should add that the lighting design by Gavan Wyrick and along with the lovely costumes by Shon Leblanc and the sound design by Chris Moscatiello provide these works with a great deal of their power.

     If there are any complaints about this wonderful gathering of two lesser known Pinter works it is simply the result of there being a reason why these plays are seldom performed. Neither of them is up to the mysterious, menacing forces and the linguistic genius of Pinter’s greatest works. In the playwright’s most successful works both on stage and in film, one can never be sure where the sexual desire may take his characters, often veering off as they do into heterosexual confusion and homosexual love or entering situations where language takes the narrative, as it awkwardly lurches forward, into new territory where it sometimes seems unsafe even to speak.

     In this case, the sexual games are all a bit too predictable and not that terribly exciting in their surprises; and these would-be dictators can hardly say anything of originality and real cleverness to the society at large. But then, even the weakest of Pinter is better than so much of theater that you simply have to wonder at his gifts. I’d suggest anyone who truly loves theater should rush off to the Odyssey to see these pieces before they end their run on April 26.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2026

Reprinted from Theater, Opera, and Performance (March 2026).

Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell (based on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House) | Mabou Mines DollHouse / 2006

you great big beautiful doll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Conceived by Lee Breuer, adapted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Mabou Mines DollHouse / Freund Playhouse, University of California Los Angeles, November 28-December 10, 2006 / the performance I witnessed was on Sunday, December 3, 2006

 

While it is popular among contemporary directors to “deconstruct” classic dramatic texts, Lee Breuer refreshingly “reconstructs” Ibsen’s great drama. A Doll’s House is, in fact, one of the Norwegian playwright’s most contrived and preachy works; when performed today, 127 years after its original premiere, it is often a painful ordeal for actors and audience alike. But rather than eviscerating Ibsen’s dramatic achievement, Breuer simply revisits the text, investing its metaphors and Victorian structures with startling new meaning.

     The entering audience is greeted with what appears to be a “collapsed” play, the performance completed, the sets, some of them already crated, littering the backstage, ready to be shipped off into history. Obviously, Breuer is reminding us that what we will soon see is a “drama,” a theatrical representation of life; but the implications go far deeper: for suddenly as the lights dim, pianist Ning Yu entering and bowing to the audience, deep red velvet-like curtains—the kind one might see in European opera houses or theaters of the 19th and early 20th century—fall into place to the sides and back of the stage. As the play is about to begin a similar curtain falls into place between the audience and the performance space, giving the sense that something is about to begin all over again. The previously “collapsed” play, the old Ibsen warhorse, is about to be revived—rebuilt from the ground up. Breuer makes it clear that we are about to witness a new work, Mabou Mines DollHouse.

     With the front curtain’s rise Nora rushes forward like a manic doll herself and, along with stagehands, raises the collapsed set—a dollhouse gift for her children’s Christmas, complete with doors, windows, chairs, couches, desks, and a hanging chandelier—an imitation Victorian living room, built to the size of Emmy and Ivar Helmer, Nora’s beloved daughter and son. Maude Mitchell’s Nora resembles a frenzied wind-up doll more than a Victorian mother, a machine reacting to events and others around her. The text simply reiterates what we have already discerned, Nora is less a human being than a toy, her husband Thorvald responding to her return home with a litany of his pet names for her: lark, squirrel, skylark, spendthrift, featherhead, and sweet tooth, nearly all prefaced with the diminutive “little.” As the doorbell rings, Nora scurries about to tidy up the room (in both Ibsen and the Mabou Mines version), readjusting the clock, which results in the appearance of the clock’s cuckoo, which reiterates both her silly and foolish condition and the fact that, like the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, this lean, tall, blonde is as completely out of place in her miniaturized world as she is out of time; if, like Dilsey, the black servant of William Faulkner’s Compton family, she automatically readjusts the clock, Nora’s also readjusts herself over and over again to life in a tiny world where any moment one fears she may break the toy chairs and couches simply by sitting upon them.

      The visit of her old school friend, Kristine Linde, reiterates the abnormality of Nora’s life, for, at first, Helmer’s still beautiful wife hardly recognizes her friend, who, having to support herself and her family for the last few years, seems less like Nora’s contemporary than an older, maiden aunt. Even Kristine describes her friend as a “child.”

     Kristine has come to ask Nora to intercede with her husband on her behalf for a job—a position which temporarily delights Nora by giving her a sense of purpose, and, accordingly, she admits to her friend that she previously “saved” her husband’s life years before by borrowing money so they might travel for his health to Italy. This revelation is, in fact, the crux of the play, representing as it does in Nora’s mind her one selfless and responsible act—perhaps the only act which she has been able to accomplish as an adult. Simultaneously, however, it has enslaved her to another man, one of Helmer’s underlings at his bank, the evil Krogstad, whom Helmer, having now risen to the position of bank manager, is about to fire. 

       All this information—tedious if necessary background plot in Ibsen’s “well-made play”— is a delight to behold in the Mabou Mines reconstruction, as Mitchell emotionally flits from a naughty, secretive schoolgirl to a pampered and willful wife to a woman proud of her accomplishment and sacrifice.

      Much of Helmer’s early encounter with Nora occurs—even in the original Ibsen drama—between rooms, as he calls from his office out to his wife. Breuer and Mitchell have simply delayed their face-to-face encounter so that when Helmer finally enters his appearance is an ironic inevitability: the males in this cast are performed by little people, men no taller than 4 and one half feet. Suddenly we perceive that the dollhouse in which Nora and Kristine awkwardly sit and converse is the perfect size for Nora’s children (the son played by a primordial female dwarf, Hannah Kirtzeck), and for Helmer and his male peers, Dr. Rank and Nils Krogstad. If this may at first appear as a kind of simplified gimmick, a ridiculous literalization of Ibsen’s tropes, by play’s end it has forced its audience to rethink Ibsen’s world, bringing The Doll’s House into the 21st century. The shock of Nora’s slamming door for late 19th century audiences is recreated for us, as we face, in the Mabou Mines version, a world in which Nora is dislocated and from which she is dissociated, forced to behave in a contorted doll-like manner—behavior brilliantly displayed in Maude Mitchell’s concatenation of sound (from baby talk babble to sexually explicit groans and moans to Garboesque quips in mock Scandinavian brogue) and movement (with all the bends, twists, turns and long-legged splits of a Raggedy Ann).

     Breuer also mines the whole range of Ibsen’s structural devices, revealing the evil machinations of characters such as Krogstad to be related to the popular melodramatic gestures of late 19th and early 20th century plays, and the stuffy, comic posturing of Ibsen’s provincial folk as sharing something with Feydeau’s farce. The creator/director underscores Nora’s sexual titillation of Helmer’s friend, Rank (upon showing him her silk stockings Nora continues: “Aren't they lovely? It is so dark here now, but to-morrow—. No, no, no! you must only look at the feet. Oh, well, you may have leave to look at the legs too.”), resulting in his startling declaration of his love that in this production—along with Krogstad’s threat to reveal her forgery of her father’s signature on the contract for the loan—sends the flailing doll-wife nearly over the edge, strobe lights recreating her sense of a manic speeding up of time and place. Given the sudden dilemmas with which Nora is faced, it is almost as if she has been forced to jump from her protected Victorian household into the stark and often frightening realities of domestic life with which we are all faced today.

     Similarly, Thorvald’s Act III confession that he “objectifies” his wife—he describes himself speaking little to her and sending stolen glances in her direction so that he might pretend that they are “secretly” in love, that she is his “secretly promised bride”—is revealed in the Mabou Mines production for what it truly is: a voyeuristic and fetishistic act that culminates in a near rape—unimaginable in Ibsen’s day—that seems to lie just below the surface of Helmer’s confession in the original that his “blood in on fire” and his reminder that he is her husband with a husband’s rights.

  Indeed, Breuer and Mitchell draw on the whole bag of dramatic styles—tragic, histrionic, melodramatic, comic, farcical, and absurdist (a demonstration akin to the various dramatic genres named by Hamlet’s resident pedant, Polonius)—to point up the implications of Ibsen’s dialogue. 

    I have always thought Ibsen’s plays to be close to spoken operas, something which apparently also struck the creators of Mabou Mines DollHouse, as the drama morphs into a representation of an opera house (stunningly designed by Narelle Sissons), each box seat filled with male and female puppets, paralleling the now larger-than-life Nora playing the miller’s beautiful daughter to Helmer’s Rumpelstiltskin as she sings an operatic aria of her desire for a miracle that never occurred. Pulling away her clothes to reveal her breasts and mons pubis, this Nora, in her declaration that she longer believes that wonderful things might happen, whips off her wig of golden locks to reveal a shaved head before she slams the door to the box in which she has been entrapped. If the play began in the 19th century, it ends in the possibility that in the future men may live in an empty world where women powerfully avenge the wrongs they have been forced to suffer.

                              

Los Angeles, December 4, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 7 (January 2007).