Last Sunday, Mer and I went to Weathervane Theater in the Valley to go see A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen. We were meeting several other teachers there – if there are spare tickets available (and it was likely on a Sunday matinee), then Weathervane will sell the tickets to teachers one half-hour before the show for 50% off. So, we happily picked up two tickets for $10.00 each.
Weathervane is a community playhouse, which means it uses community actors. In this particular play, the major bad guy was played by one of our CVCA colleagues (actually, he is the head of the Bible Department, which adds some fun irony when he plays bad guys). I have generally liked productions that I have seen at the theater, so I was looking forward to the outing.
Going into the play, I knew almost nothing about A Doll’s House; I knew it was vaguely about a wife who left her abusive husband. It turns out that is a very overly simple perspective of the play. The play was originally in Norwegian, and this was a relatively new translation by a playwright who did not speak Norwegian. He used several different literal translations of the play, and then updated the language and cut away extra characters that had smaller parts (like the maid and the children).
The play revolved around five characters: a husband and wife, her old school friend who is looking for work, a family friend who is a doctor dying of complications from his father’s venereal disease, and a man who works for a bank that the husband is now about to manage. As the play unfolds, it turns out the wife had borrowed money from the banker who is desperate to keep his job and tries to blackmail the wife. All the events of the play revolve around how this plays out, covering three acts and three different days over a few weeks.
The play was well acted. I liked the main character (the wife) very much. She had a desperate energy that propelled her through the play. The other actors were also very fine. Our colleague did a nice job of playing a threatening and desperate man (the banker).
The writing of the play is very nice. The plot unfolds in an unhurried way, and you do not get to see the true characters of the people involved until the third act. At that point, the two main characters are very complex. The husband who had seemed nice but overly patronizing suddenly reveals that he is a selfish and egotistical character with almost no regard for his wife when the crisis hits. The wife turns out to be stronger than we would have expected, but is equally selfish in her own way. When she explains to her husband that she is leaving him and the children until (in modern terms) she “finds herself,” it reads like a poorly written love-yourself book from the 60s and 70s. And yet you still can see why she does it. There is no one to really pull for and no one to really hate. I guess that is why Ibsen is seen as an important figure in the realist movement.
It was fun to get to see a play with three other teachers (and two other people with them), and I do enjoy seeing people I know act. It makes me feel like part of the “in” crowd. The play went almost three hours, but it did not feel like it. Sadly, Mer and I could not stay for the talk-back portion of the show since we had to get home (I had an evening meeting to get to). Still, it was a worthwhile outing.