Word: torvalds
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While the supporting players are all competent, with Jim Caudle especially shining as Dr. Rank, it is Julie Glucksman's Nora and Brad Dalton's Torvald who make the play work. Dalton effectively portrays Torvald's flawed character, almost a caricature of intolerance and insensitivity. Showing no understanding of human imperfection or feelings, he constructs a dream world of perfection around his doll-wife Nora and cannot understand her violating it, even to save his life. In lesser hands the role could come off as a mere foil for Nora to rebel against. It is to Dalton's credit that...
James Dolbear also fails as Nora's tyrannical husband Thomas, unnecessarily Americanized from Ibsen's Torvald. His mugging and blustering gives the character a sort of musical comedy quality; a cute shallowness. His tone never changes. He's not believable for a second as an ambitious, willful man, tortured by the demands of respectability--he's just a sissy, a bone-headed dolt...
...little squirrel" imagery of the play literally, she skitters about the stage like a sandpiper. This does not destroy Nora's coquettishness, but it certainly diminishes it. There seems to be an arbitrary rhetoric of motions with which Ullmann plays the role. When she fears that her husband Torvald (Sam Waterston) will discover her secret dealings with the malignant moneylender Krogstadt (Barton Heyman), she makes the panicky gestures of a heroine in a silent-movie melodrama. When she reads the riot act to Torvald prior to slamming the famous door, she sits as motionless as a pillar...
...supporting cast cannot save A Doll's House if the Nora buckles. Still, this cast might be sued for nonsupport. With no trace of a guiding hand from Norwegian Director Tormod Skagestad, the players appear to be introducing themselves to each other at first rehearsal. As Torvald, Waterston is a mildly ruffled porcupine who can be dequilled instantly by Ullmann. Petty or not, Torvald should be a visible tyrant. After all, Nora is not slamming the door at middle-level management, but at the historic tyranny of convention...
When I asked McCleery if the suspicious resemblance between the relationships in his play and in A Doll's House were merely coincidental, he acknowledged that Nora and Torvald Handover were pretty strong influences on him as he created the Hardesty pair. He drew a lot from Ibsen: marital strife stemming from an imbalanced relationship, the husband's view of the wife as a subservient partner, and the wife's surreptitious assistance to the husband and his career success. But Hardesty Park lacks the pessimistic and jaded timbre of Ibsen's drama...