Inside A Doll’s House, Part 2

Inside A Doll’s House, Part 2
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I recently attended a matinee performance of A Doll’s House, Part 2, the Broadway send-up of the seminal 1879 Henrik Ibsen play in which Nora, the long-suffering wife of Torvald, her cold and unknowing husband, scandalously leaves her family for parts—and a life—unknown. The new play by Lucas Hnath is a comedy, and a treatise on love, marriage and the price of independence when Nora returns 15 years later to ask Torvald for a favor.

But much of the drama happened before the play even began, when the line for the women’s bathroom threatened the show’s start time—as it often does—and a female theater employee diverted women four-at-a-time into the far less crowded men’s room. I was taken to the new line inside the vestibule, just steps from a row of men standing at urinals against a wall, while women were shown into adjacent stalls. I can’t remember the last time, if ever there was one, when I saw a man try to look so small.

I stood in this new, makeshift line and watched the scene unfold. Everyone did his business and not much else. The men tried to flee as quickly as possible without any comment or eye contact. Meanwhile, the women smiled at each other, each of us with a bit of a twinkle in her eye. Any impatience that might have existed had dissipated—after all, we’ve been standing in line our whole lives, and this was something new.

When it was my turn, I surveyed the hunched backs at the urinals then ducked into a stall. I exited to the backs of different men, but they looked the same in their collective desire to disappear. None of them said a word, until an older gentleman in a baseball cap cracked a joke that I couldn’t hear. It elicited a faint response from the women who heard him. They nodded or smiled so he’d know he’d been heard, but they didn’t respond to what likely was a silly aside—women have been blankly smiling at unwelcome comments for ages.

I washed my hands, left the bathroom and sought the woman who had led us there. She was wrangling even more women in an effort to move everyone along.

“Thank you very, very much,” I said. She smiled, knowingly, and clearly proud of her job well done. I wondered if this was a daily event, and whether today’s non-reaction from the men and women was typical.

I live in New York City, where everyone waits on a lot of lines. But I don’t recall ever being led into an active men’s room, a situation that puts men, for a change, in a possibly humiliating position. Like most women, I know these vulnerable places far too well, and so I had to hand it to the men; they didn’t love having us there—why would they?—but they accepted us without complaint.

As I entered the theater I wondered if this trifle of an event might signify a new day. Thoughts of transgender bathroom controversies and women’s marches swirled in my head and I decided that, yes, there was some weight to the scene I had witnessed: It was one small step for mankind—to be sure—but that’s pretty significant considering most days, especially these days, feel like a journey without end.

I took my seat and watched the show, which depicts another kind of evolution. A Doll’s House, Part 2 treats audiences to wonderful performances by Condola Rashad as Nora and Torvald’s daughter in a seamless display of colorblind casting; Chris Cooper as a Torvald with a voice and a backbone; Jayne Houdyshell is their principled housekeeper in the difficult middle; and the great Laurie Metcalf is Nora, that epoch-making, 19th-century heroine who turned her back on what she saw as the intolerable confinement of her marriage and went out into the world, neither hunched nor small, but big and unafraid, paving the way for so many since Ibsen wrote his timeless play.

The crowd laughed and cheered and enjoyed itself, and I was glad there were no pot shots taken; no man- or woman-hating in a story about so much more than mere gender roles that a lesser work might have espoused. Instead, the reality was a lot like that scene that preceded it in the underbelly of the theater: It was equal.

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