Often stripping a play right down to the bare essentials — easy costumes, a couple of chairs — renders it rawer and more authentic.
Not so within the uneven revival of “A Doll’s House,” starring Oscar winner Jessica Chastain, that opened Thursday night on Broadway.
Running time: 1 hour and 40 minutes. On the Hudson Theatre, 141 W. forty fourth St.
Despite an absorbing performance from the “Eyes of Tammy Faye” actress, British director Jamie Lloyd’s staging is as sterile as an operating room.
If only the actors donned colourful blue medical scrubs.
As an alternative, everybody here wears drab, metropolitan black clothes. The set of wood seats is dimly lit by eye-straining fluorescents. The solid speaks softly into body mikes, which supplies the play an NPR calmness. All things considered, it’s loads of high-minded ideas that never cohere right into a riveting whole.
Even before the play starts, a Nordic chill settles over Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s classic 1879 tale of Nora Helmer, a repressed housewife with a destructive secret.
Because the audience shuffles into its seats on the Hudson Theatre, they gawk and snap pictures of Chastain sitting silently in a chair — Marina Abramović style — while a turntable rotates the A-lister around. The actress almost never leaves her seat for the whole 100 minutes.
The pre-show spin cycle is unquestionably a shout-out to Nora’s climactic famous early-feminist speech through which she involves the conclusion she has merely been “performing tricks” for her husband Torvald (Arian Moayed), who views his wife and the mother of his children as little greater than a flesh-and-blood ornament.
So, Chastain becomes a doll for us, too. But that fast self-awareness introduces one other problem: the production jumps the gun on the ending.
There may be hardly any suspense or sense of surprise. Quite, we get an all-around mood of resignation.
Nora’s marriage to Torvald, a proud banker, comes across as immediately doomed and loveless, because Chastain’s Nora is very aloof and Moayed, while charismatic, plays the hubby as a recent jerk out of a Judd Apatow movie.
The story, due to this fact, stays even-keeled with a slow-and-steady pace, like an animatronic ride called “It’s A Doll’s World After All.”
The intrusion of her old friend Kristine (Jesmille Darbouze) and the vengeful Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan) mixes things up, in fact, but only as much as this production of lifeless gray and whispered lines will allow.
Each actors have forceful presences, but are scarily clinical here — Terminators looking for Nora, as a substitute of Sarah Connor.
How can such a static tone possibly work for a play through which the foremost character publicizes “I actually have modified” in the long run?
It only occasionally does.
During that final speech, Chastain is at her most alive and thrilling.
Actually, her Nora is a pleasure to observe throughout for her aura alone, which has come a great distance from her “Heiress” days. She’s held back in additional ways than one by Lloyd’s direction.
Still, there’s a spark of intrigue and playfulness to whatever move she makes, and as Nora’s burdensome debt involves light, Chastain approaches it with quiet, modern anxiety.
She’s also gripping when opposite the superb Michael Patrick Thornton as Dr. Rank, Nora’s flirty confidant.
He does best with playwright Amy Herzog’s added colloquial dialogue, and smartly seizes upon the microphone as a possibility to be more natural and vulnerable — not one other sexy Siri.
What’s going to have everybody talking, though, is the ending.
During Lloyd’s tackle the play’s well-known final moment, people seated around me giggled, “ooo”d and “ahh”d as if a chandelier had just plummeted over the orchestra.
Back in 1879, Nora’s ultimate decision caused a societal uproar, so the director might be trying to present us the “I Can’t Imagine It’s Not Butter” version of that.
And, by itself, it’s a fun trick.
Yet, call me quaint, but to take a play a couple of woman who powerfully realizes she’s not only a plaything for men, but her own human being, and end it with a cutesy gimmick is wrongheaded.
It’s one other silly toy within the dollhouse.
