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The Dartmouth
July 12, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Mabou Mines shocks with avant-garde Ibsen adaptation

On the Hopkins Center posters for this week's production "Dollhouse" -- an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's classic play "A Doll's House" by the acclaimed avant-garde theater group Mabou Mines -- one might notice that, in contrast to the six-foot woman shown, the man looks somewhat ... shorter. In fact, all male actors in the production range in height from 3'4" to 4'5". How outrageous, right? Director Lee Breuer certainly hopes theatergoers will think so.

In 1879, when Ibsen's protagonist Nora first slammed the door on her authoritarian husband and her role as his "little squirrel," it scandalized Victorian society. A woman abandoning her family? How outrageous! As one writer stated, that slamming door "reverberated across the roof of the world.''

Since then, countless Noras have slammed doors on countless stages. Ibsen, the bad boy of the theater of his day, has become the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Realism has become commonplace. How can new productions make Nora's door reverberate with the same force as the original?

Sometimes scandals come in small packages.

As Breuer explained after last night's performance of "Dollhouse" in Moore Theater, "[we conceived] the dollness of 'Dollhouse' as patriarchal. The women are cut down to size." Quite literally cut down, in fact.

Throughout the production Nora and other female characters must squeeze through doorways, balance themselves in tiny furniture and crawl on their hands and knees to gain what they want from men.

This "comic turn," Breuer says, shows "patriarchal power" as "illusory." Nora may be cast in a constricting role in a world in which she cannot grow, but she can cast this role off, as she does dramatically in Breuer's operatic ending by singing, stripping and ... well, I won't ruin the ending.

The "parable of scale" is only the beginning of Breuer's deconstructivist approach, however. Breuer believes the play's social commentary remains pertinent today, but that a modern production must "build a bridge" from 1879 to today. That bridge, he claims, is the postmodern approach.

Literal interpretations of Ibsen's script abound. Ibsen's play was said to "rip the curtain off the Victorian living room" -- so Breuer's actors at times rip each others clothes off. Nora is called a "doll wife" and a "little songbird" -- so her voice remains painfully high, her rouge painfully pink, and her movements as light and energetic as the "squirrel" she is required to be.

When husband Torvald forgives his wife, he proceeds to hump the mattress under the sheets. "It turns Torvald on to forgive his wife, because it gives him so much power," Breuer said. "The 'dollhouse' is a man's world and only doll-like women who diminish themselves, allowing their men to feel grand, can hope to live in it."

It may seem "counterintuitive" to some audience members, as The Village Voice states, to find a similarity between Breuer, "the bad boy of avant-garde theater, and Ibsen, the father of realism ... [but] Breuer's strange and beautiful overstepping approach to Ibsen's classic reveals, most of all, the old master's appropriation and transcendence of the proprieties of his day."

From one bad boy to the next it seems. In 130 years, will Breuer be considered the "father of the new avant-garde?" That may be taking things too far. But, as Philip Bither, curator of performing arts at the Walker Art Center, states, Breuer is "one of the most important creators in American theater in the last 30 years ... He takes great chances and often gets great results."

Breuer was a founding member of Mabou Mines and his work with the theater company has received countless honors and awards. His 1996 "Epidog" included the only puppet to win a Village Voice OBIE award.

Mabou Mines was named after a Nova Scotia community where founding members created the company in 1970. The New York City-based group specializes in the creation of new theater pieces from original and existing texts and has received more than 50 awards and citations for excellence, including the 1974 OBIE Award for General Excellence and the 1986 OBIE for Sustained Achievement.

Its work has been presented throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and Asia.

Ibsen once stated, "A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men." In his play about a woman who dared to be herself at all costs, Ibsen ignored the laws of melodrama to create a new theatrical idiom.

During the intermission, the man beside me said of the production, "It's like we are going in one direction, and then -- where did we go?"

In his production of "Dollhouse," Lee Breuer is breaking the rules once again.

Mabou Mines will be performing "Dollhouse" again tonight at 7 p.m. in Moore Theater. Tickets are $5 for Dartmouth students and $28 for general admission.