Three plays

This past December, I read three plays, The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and As You Like It. 

In The Piano Lesson, Berniece is operating all alone in a world of men.  Everything has either fallen apart or is in the process of doing so.  It’s up to Berniece to literally exorcise a ghost, send everyone back where they belong and make things right.  In the other plays, Nora and Rosalind make things right, but in different ways.

In the foreword to The Piano Lesson, Toni Morrison says she likes to read plays, rather than see them done on stage.  She prefers “the vigorous interactions between reader and text and meeting the imaginative demands of the work on one’s own.” 

This seems greedy, to want to hoard a play from the actors, the director, the other theater artists, and the audience whom you might otherwise share a play with.  But of course reading a play alone, with only your own interpretation, lets you experience it in your own idiosyncratic way and see things that might otherwise have been buried. 

After reading A Doll’s House, I had one interpretation.  It seems like Nora leaves Torvald because he fills his assigned role poorly.  He’s weak, a failed man and therefore undeserving.  This is from Act Three.

Helmer: And can you tell me what I have done to forfeit your love?

Nora: Yes, I can.  It was tonight when the wonderful thing did not happen, then I saw you were not the man I had thought you. 

Helmer: Explain yourself better – I don’t understand you.

Nora: I have waited so patiently for eight years … I felt quite certain that the wonderful thing was going to happen at last … I was so absolutely certain you would come forward and take everything upon yourself and say: I am the guilty one. 

She wanted Torvald to be brave, to step up, to take responsibility and to fight. 

She’s like Rosalind in As You Like it in that regard.  She falls for Orlando but she does not accept him until he has proven his worth by defeating the best wrestler in the land, killing a lion, and learning the language of love.  He becomes a proper man.  Rosalind reveals herself to be a proper woman.  She and Orlando – and most of the other characters – marry and balance is restored. 

Camille Paglia (stay with me!) in her essay, Teaching Shakespeare to Actors writes of Rosalind, “Her ritual divestment of her male garb before her wedding restores the Renaissance gender code and magically generates an apparition of Hymen, the guardian spirit of marriage.”

Nora, similarly, seemed to just want the system to work, for her and Torvald to play their assigned roles.  When she found things out of whack, she left. 

But this explanation didn’t really sit well with me.  Then I saw Tacoma Little Theater’s production of the play and my interpretation changed radically.  It’s not that Nora wants to play her role and have Torvald play his and have the scales be balanced.  It’s that she realized there is no possibility of balance because she counts for nothing and carries no weight in Torvald’s and society’s system.

It’s the actors’ performances that made the difference.  Annie Katica Green’s Nora and Sean Neely’s Torvald are so clearly mismatched that you can’t root for them in any way at all, let alone the way you root for Rosalind and Orlando. 

Watching Green's performance, I saw Nora’s confidence that a humane system could never let her down.  The lines about how there could not possibly be a law that would punish her for protecting her father or saving her husband’s life stood out.  In Act One, Nora and Krogstad are speaking about the law.  Krogstad says, “it is the law by which you will be judged.” 

Nora: I don’t believe it.  Is a daughter not to be allowed to spare her dying father anxiety and care?  Is a wife not to be allowed to save her husband’s life?  I don’t know much about law, but I am certain that there must be laws permitting such things as that … No, it’s impossible, I did it for love’s sake. 

With that set up, I saw the conversation with Torvald in Act Three in a different light.  Nora sees that what’s important to Torvald is the esteem in which other men hold him.  There’s no place for her.  She goes.

I feel like these ideas need expansion, revising, questioning, deepening and maybe other things. So I welcome your comments.