DOLL’S HOUSE A
DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE
James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean Florie Seery, Associate Dean
Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean Nancy Yao, Assistant Dean
PRESENTS
A Doll’s House
By Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by Amy Herzog
Directed by Ron Van Lieu
Production Dramaturgs
Jordan Allyn
Zoë Nagel
Fight and Intimacy Directors
Kelsey Rainwater
Michael Rossmy
Choreographer
Gabrielle Niederhoffer
Stage Manager
Jonathan Fong 馮子睿 cast creative team
Nora Helmer
Lolade Agunbiade
Doctor Rank
Hiếu Ngọc Bùi
Kristine Linde
Yishan Hao
Nils Krogstad
Amrith Jayan
Anne-Marie
Sarah Lo
Torvald Helmer
Erik Manuel Robles
Nora’s Children
Tyler Clarke
Emma Steiner
setting Norway
content guidance
This production includes suicidal ideation.
A Doll’s House is performed without an intermission.
This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.
Artistic
Assistant Director
John Evans Reese
Assistant Stage Manager
Adam Taylor Foster
Production
Production Manager
Kino Alvarez
Associate Safety Advisors
Jazzmin Bonner
Matteo Lanzarotta
Alesandra Reto Lopez
Meredith Wilcox
Run Crew
Tyler Clarke
Twaha Abdul Majeed
Administration
Associate Managing Director
Adrian Alexander Hernandez
Assistant Managing Director
Sarah Saifi
Management Assistants
Raekwon Fuller
Gavin D. Pak
House Manager
Maura Bozeman
Production Photographer
Maza Rey
David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.
Yale acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.
We also acknowledge the legacy of slavery in our region and the enslaved African people whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the business of Yale University as well as the economy of Connecticut and the United States.
The Studio Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.
THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION FUND , established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.
The setting of A Doll’s House (1879) is entirely confined to one room: the living room of a typical Victorian-era home. Ibsen’s audiences would have been intimately familiar with rooms like this. Doll’s House was one of the first and most influential examples of realism in theater, which throughout the early 19th century had been stocked primarily with melodramatic and Romantic plays that emphasized heightened emotionality and grand locales. The recognizability of Torvald and Nora’s middle-class concerns set in a middle-class living room swept first Norway, then the globe.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own.”
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
The play gained particular acclaim in China. In 1918, the Chinese journal Xin Qingnian (New ) published an issue about Ibsen with a Chinese translation
Realism Room
Hysteria Room
Popularity Room Living Room
A Doll’s House. The play became one of the most frequently performed foreign plays in China at the time and ignited a trend of “departure plays,” which portray people (not just women) who reject familial pressures in the pursuit of personal freedom.
In 1875, Dr. Edward Clarke wrote the book Sex in Education, arguing that educating women caused the energy in their bodies to go to their brains rather than their reproductive organs. This, he believed, was the root cause of hysteria in women, a now-outdated diagnosis that was believed to manifest as uncontrollable emotionality and nervousness. The prevailing treatment for hysteria was Dr. Silas Mitchell’s “rest cure,” which recommended that patients be confined to their bedroom as much as possible and forbidden from engaging in any stimulating activity like reading. Nora Helmer exists in a time when women were calling for the right to vote, work, and have a say in their own lives. At the same time, all of these actions were the very things that the physicians treating hysteria claimed were the roots of the illness. And the treatment? The opposite of a room of one’s own: forced bed rest.
PLAY WITH ME!
Did you play with dolls as a child? Polly Pocket? Barbie? Cabbage Patch? Matryoshka? G.I. Joe? Here’s your chance to reconnect with your childhood. Tear me off and take me on a journey throughout the doll house. I love to wear nice clothes, dance around, and be guided every which way by you. Remember, I’m fragile. I’ll endure for as long as your care for me lasts. But once you mature, you must let me go. And if you don’t, I will leave on my own.
—Jordan Allyn and Zoë Nagel, Production