A doll’s house, 2023
EVERYMAN THEATRE Baltimore MD Director & Adaptor Joanie Schultz Scenic Design Chelsea M. Warren Costume Design David Burdick Lighting Design Aja M. Jackson Sound Design T. Carlis Roberts Production Photography Kiirstn Pagan for Everyman Theatre
*see REVIEWS/FEATURES below
OVERVIEW: The design includes the Norwegian Victorian period-esque entrance parlour of the Helmer household, with two binary hardwood floors intersecting and a foreboding door at center. The scenic backdrop is an oversized William Morris inspired draped wallpaper (digitally printed) which swags into the room and pools to the sides of the floor and down into the audience seating. This drapery is the mask of formality in a patriarchal doll’s house, that of Nora and Torvald. Once secrets are unveiled and Nora leaves this home the drop falls, revealing what was once assumed to be an internal wall as external. Nora exits with a door slam; the drop falls; and Nora takes her first step forward with an inhale into her unknown future. Additional features include an european-style Christmas Tree on an automated base, which turns from undecorated to decorated as time moves forward. Also, a grandfather clock counts down the hours until Nora’s secret is told; the clock remarkably was automated to both tick in real time during the scenes and hands fast forward the accurate amount of time passing between scenes. The production poses the inquiry, outside the confines of a binary patriarchy, what is our relationship and responsibility to one another?
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
REVIEWS/FEATURES
Broadway World, A Challenging DOLL'S HOUSE at Everyman Theatre, Jack L.B. Gohn: “I noticed, and perhaps the audience was intended to notice, that the impressive set (by Chelsea Warren in an apparent local debut) doubles down on the doll’s house metaphor. The living room where everything takes place departs from Ibsen’s stage directions which locate the front door elsewhere in the house; in this set, the front door sits right in the middle of the back wall. And what a door! It is huge and out of human scale. The characters all look like dolls next to it, as well as next to the wall hanging that abuts it on both flanks. The world that the door lets out into is perpetually a bleak, dark midwinter night. The home, then, is made to feel as if it is the place that succors life from the threat of a forbidding world that starts right at the door’s frame. Perhaps this bit of design conveys as well that the house is a safe haven – but a fragile one, as a surprise stage effect I shall not describe effectively conveys its frangibility. I assume that the subliminal message was that Nora’s sortie into the world outside at the end is a step into bleakness and risk, as well as freedom and a larger-scale world.”