A Gut-Renovated Doll's House

Jessica Chastain stars in Jamie Lloyd's very bare staging.

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Jamie Lloyd's production of A Doll's House peaks before the play begins. As members of the audience file into their seats at the Hudson Theatre, Jessica Chastain sits motionless in a wooden chair that circles the bare stage on a slow revolve. In a simple black dress and boots, she leans back and stares outward, ignoring the bustle of theatergoers climbing over one another to their seats, muttering about how well they know the play or about Chastain's movie stardom. Often, they raise a phone to record a video as she spins past (it makes for a great Instagram Story). Closer to curtain time, the rest of the cast assembles around Chastain in chairs and dark outfits of their own, their tableau combining the aesthetics of the Apple Genius Bar and a Shaker museum. The date "1879," when Henrik Ibsen's drama was published and is set, is projected behind them. They are still. She spins. The doll, as it were, is present-cooking under scrutiny like a Barbie in a microwave.

If only the rest of the production lived up to-or, really, departed from-that first image. Lloyd puts Chastain in that chair and then keeps her there almost all evening. The stage remains bare, and the actors play their scenes in ways that only gesture toward the action described in dialogue. You get the conceptual point rather quicker than Lloyd thinks you will: Nora Helmer is trapped by the expectations placed on her as a bourgeois housewife. She performs for her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed), playing a happy little songbird, but it exhausts her. If you know Ibsen's famous ending, or even if you're going off obvious context clues, you'll surmise that eventually Nora will get out of that chair. I thought of a rubber band pulled back to launch across the room that's held for too long, losing its elasticity.