Plays for Our Times: “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” by Lucas Hnath

First in a series, Plays for Our Times

Rethinking a classic work of art is like rethinking your own DNA: It’s not easily done, because you and said work of art are so at one. And if said work of art is a “classic” — with a vintage of at least 100 years or reaching back to ancient times — its durability is its argument. Depending on your psychic need, the truth embedded in said classic — be it drama, novel, poem — not only speaks to you in the abstract. It may change your life forever: shape your psyche, drive your actions, guide you in a crisis.

Certainly that is how the dramas of the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1908) have affected me. Ibsen, who was revered by his fellow artists, was brilliant at showing human beings contending with the forces of their social and historical context — -with the intensely human dramas he depicted speaking as powerfully to our disjointed times as to his own. In his time, his dramas scandalized his hidebound society.

Most especially, Ibsen’s plays “An Enemy of the People” (which premiered in 1883) and “A Doll’s House” (which premiered in1879) both entered my DNA when I read them in high school, with Dr. Stockmann of “Enemy” and Nora Helmer of “Doll’s House” resonating at signal junctures throughout my life. Principally Dr. Stockmann, who tries to protect public safety by raising the alarm that the waters of his famous spa town have become contaminated, only to meet universal resistance and be forced into…