Mabou Mines Dollhouse
November 30, 2005 – December 18, 2005
Performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Adapted and Directed by Lee Breuer
Based on Ibsen's A Doll's House
A major theatrical event and part of an international tour, Mabou Mines DollHouse transforms Ibsen's bourgeois tragedy into high comedy with a deep bite. In the tradition of Lee Breuer's award winning series of imaginative classics, like Gospel at Colonus and the gender-reversed Lear, DollHouse is on a political track that speaks not a word of politics.
Breuer turns Ibsen's mythic feminist "anthem" on its head by physicalizing the equation of Power and Scale. Torvald, Rank and Krogstad (the men), are all played by actors whose heights range from 3'4" to 4'5". Nora and Kristine are both near six feet tall and nothing dramatizes Ibsen's patriarchal point more clearly than the image of these little men dominating and commanding women 1 1/2 times their size in a "playhouse size" doll house. Eve Beglarian's piano concerti, inspired by Edvard Grieg, accompany each scene, silent movie-like, while Martha Clarke's choreography further deconstructs the melodrama's posturing into dance.
