Lee Breuer's diminutive sets, unusual casting give Ibsen play a strangely comedic twist

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 26, 2006

BY CHANNING GRAY
Journal Arts Writer

Director Lee Breuer has a knack for taking existing plays and putting his unique stamp on them.

When it came to revisiting Oedipus at Colonus, he staged Sophocles' tragedy with a gospel choir. Then there was his cross-gendered Lear.

Now, Breuer and his Mabou Mines theater troupe are bringing an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House to Rhode Island College Wednesday. The play, Mabou Mines DollHouse, sticks pretty close to the original text. But by means of unusual sets and casting, this dark drama has been transformed into a wacky comedy.

The three male leads are all played by people about 4 feet tall, while the women are almost 6 feet. In love scenes, the women sometimes have to lift the men up to their height. In some cases, the women play their parts on their knees to make the men look bigger.

Breuer also calls for a diminutive set that resembles a doll's house, or at least a child's playhouse. Nora, the heroine, must crawl on all fours to squeeze into the tiny furnishings and cater to her husband's whims.

In a sense, Breuer has turned Ibsen on his head.

In the original play, set in the male-dominated world of 19th-century Norway, Nora Helmer is treated as a child -- a doll, if you will. What her domineering husband, Torvald, doesn't know is that she has borrowed money from nasty Krogstad by forging her father's signature. The money was for a trip to Italy for Torvald's health.

When Torvald finds out in a letter from Krogstad what Nora has done, he flies into a rage, accuses her of ruining his reputation, and threatens to forsake her. But when a second letter from Krogstad arrives saying that he is sending back the IOU and dropping the matter, Torvald apologizes.

But it is too late. Seeing her husband's true nature for the first time, Nora does the unthinkable: She leaves him and their children.

"We've reversed it," Breuer said from Cambridge, Mass., where he is a fellow at Harvard. "The men fit in the doll's house. The whole idea of dollness is a man's world. The women don't fit.

"You have small men doing these great tragic roles. You get the idea that patriarchalism is an illusion."

Mabou Mines (the company is named for a town in Nova Scotia where members used to summer) dates to 1970, when experimental New York theater was in its heyday. Over the years, the six-member ensemble has adapted numerous plays and other literary works to its own style of political commentary, including eight pieces by Samuel Beckett.

But as Breuer points out, a play such as DollHouse, which is about three years into a five-year run, is "doing politics without saying politics. It's politics by visualization."

Visually, he said, the play is puncturing the balloon of patriarchy. Slowly all the power wielded by these men leaks out.

The 'YMCA' of feminism

The show also features a chorus of puppets that sing opera at the end of the play, as Torvald and Nora split up.

The puppets, said Breuer, are used because the last scene is almost unstageable. It's the sort of diatribe one might hear in court, he said. Therefore, he "wanted to spoof it, to make it campy.

"I don't think it would ever work if we played it straight," he said.

The 36 handcrafted marionettes sit in little opera boxes, serenading the actors. When the show is in a city for several days, the hall is hung with red velvet curtains to create a space resembling a Baroque-era theater.

But that will not be the case at RIC's Roberts Auditorium, since the show is in town for just one night. The cost of transforming the hall would not be worth it.

The show, said Breuer, has been on the road for three years, and has yet to make money. It's not a commercial production, but nonprofit theater.

While Ibsen's A Doll's House is often thought of as the first feminist play, Breuer said there was already in Norway a radical feminist movement afoot.

"The reason for the puppets is the play is not cutting-edge feminism," he said. "It's a feminist anthem. It's the 'YMCA' of feminism. It should be very Verdi-esque."

The opera sections were written by composer Eve Beglarian, who also produced a piano score reminiscent of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.

Split responses

Because of the radical representation of the sexes in DollHouse, Breuer said that audience members tend to take sides. He overheard one couple arguing during a performance at a Brooklyn warehouse. The conversation went like this:

Man: "I hate it."

Woman: "I really like it. I want to stay to see the ending."

Man: "What time is it over? I'll come back and pick you up."

Woman: "Don't bother."

"Women are more sensitive to it than men," said Breuer, "especially in more macho cultures. I showed it to a friend in Greece, and he said, 'What are you doing, making men into clowns?' So there's a gender war thing going on here."

While audiences may be split over the content of the show, the critics have pretty much been in agreement. Paris' Le Monde newspaper called it one of the best foreign productions in the last 15 years, and it has won Obies -- the Off-Broadway world's highest honor -- for best performance and best director.

"It can stand up to any Ibsen in the world," said Breuer, addding that DollHouse is among his best adaptations, with The Gospel at Colonus and Peter and Wendy being the other two.

And that is all the more surprising, since DollHouse doesn't have any big-name stars, even though the actors are "brilliant," said Breuer. All the little people in the show are Los Angeles film actors.

Asked if any of them feel their roles are demeaning, Breuer said that these actors like a good gag as well as the next guy.

"It's a whole lot better than sitting around Hollywood waiting to be cast as leprechauns," he said.

Mabou Mines DollHouse takes place Wednesday night at 8 in Roberts Auditorium, 600 Mount Pleasant Ave., Providence. Tickets are $30, with discounts for seniors, RIC students, faculty and staff.

Call (401) 456-8144, or purchase tickets online at www.ric.edu/pfa, or drop by the box office until the time of the performance.

cgray@projo.com / (401) 277-7492

See a gallery of photos from Mabou Mines Dollhouse

http://www.projo.com/slideshow/2006/maboumines/