Visceral: Loved it. I was consistently surprised in a way that I rarely have been in the theatre. The set, the use of the run crew, the acting choices, the bits of physical business – everything felt brave, creative, and effectively discomforting. I remember especially the first moment of the production – the choice to start with a bare set and then to lower in the beautiful red curtains with such ominous lethargy. Before my eyes I saw the illusion of the dollhouse created. Had I walked in to see the set already constructed, a massive amount of the nuance and message of the play would have been lost. This attention to every aspect of the production, from casting through to the wonderful interaction with the pianist was lavished with remarkable attention and discretion. The production disturbed me, moved me, shocked me. I laughed for a lot of it, not quite out of humor, but out of gleeful surprise.

Having Processed: Now, a while later, I have some slightly different thoughts. Thinking back on the production I realize that a lot of what I remember is the production. What is the story of “A Doll’s House”? I honestly couldn’t tell you. I had never read it before, and lots of details in the story and characters were lost to me. I was still able to basically follow the action, but my focus was rarely on the story itself. Having said that, doing a version of a well-known text rather than an original work did give the production the ability to focus on other things since the content is widely enough known.

Also, while the physical life of the play was very vibrant, many times I had no clue why characters were doing what they did. Often the physical interludes would serve to confound me more, because I couldn’t tell what was motivating them. But again, is this the point?

I find that everything potentially negative I could find to say about this production traps me into the question “but what if that’s the point?” Sure I couldn’t find the justification of the physicality in the performances. But what if that’s the point? I didn’t understand a lot of the story, just the visceral effect of the imagery. But what if that’s the point?

I now find, having gone through that odd paragraph, that the production in fact was great. Great in terms of my response, that is, BECAUSE it has forced me to ask “but what it that’s the point?” And in asking that I am thinking deeply about the point of theatre – a worthy discussion which this piece of art managed to effectively stimulate.

Maybe, for me, that’s the point. Whether or not I “liked” the show, I wish that more theatre would challenge me as thoroughly.

But I didn’t plan to blog, because – well, first, I think we thought we weren’t ALL supposed to blog about it? haha, but also – I STILL don’t feel like I have a “whole,” “thoughtful” post! I just have a lot of feelings, and they’re quiet and they’re not quiet but either way they don’t have words yet? I could probably be all, production value! choices! zomg curtain and I counted the light fixtures! but – it wasn’t about that? Even coming home, considering a post on my personal blog (which is even less coherent than here, if that’s possible, so it’d've been okay if it was just all – BLURRY BRIMMY ~FEELINGS), the only thing I really wanted to say was, “If you like Art-with-a-capital-A, go see this now.”

Or maybe not even. Maybe just, “GO SEE THIS NOW!!”

It was an experience. Something to be experienced and not described. Even if it DIDN’T speak to your heart – and I’m still not sure in a way if it spoke to mine – it was so, SO interesting. I’m incredibly sorry we saw the second-to-last production ever; I would have liked to encourage others to go.

What makes this production avant garde? Well…it’s cutting edge in it’s representation of a “classic.” What makes it cutting edge then? The fact that it’s not a living room drama as imagined? I think it would be wise to quote Charles Mee, who, like many others, has recognized that “There is no such thing as an original play.” The same applies to this particular Doll’s House production.

All of these forms of movement, puppetry, design and stylization are not new. What is new and cutting edge is how the forms are used and arranged to create effective story-telling. When “A Doll’s House” originally premiered in Norway, Realism was shocking. Well…today realism is the status quo. Dare I say that we believe that it is a representation of our reality, and so then often we don’t question it as a specific choice.

The Mabou Mines’ production stays very true to the playwright’s original intent by asking questions like how can sexed inequalities be made painstakingly obvious? The size of the actors forces the audience to ask, “why?” where if Helmer were four inches shorter than Nora, the question would not be so obvious. Also, what is in the Russian, blue-dress doll motif including Nora, her daughter, the rag doll, and the paper dolls and how does this choice overall relate to the DollHouse set? I believed that the distorted, hyper-performativity in the piece mirrored the gendered performances we all play in life.

By screwing with our expectations, yet telling the story in full, the audience is able to interact with “A Doll’s House” in a way that transcends the comfortability of a cushy “classic.” The audience is then forced to ask, how does this story relate to my world today? And this, I believe, is the unsettling question that leads to new investigations and musings on life that immortalizes the art itself.

That’s because, I’m more-than-a-little-bit relieved to say, Mabou Mines’ “Dollhouse” was the first piece of theatre I’ve seen in a long time that I just FELT. It asked that I EXPERIENCE it, and nothing more. That experiencing, though, that letting the waves of it break and wash over me, was more than enough. I feel like that was all I could really even TRY to do during and after the show; my attempts to intellectualize and analyze the production were alltogether futile. It’s not that I couldn’t/can’t write you a critical essay about the socio-politicism of “Dollhouse” or whatever – it’s just that something in me is saying that I don’t want to or that I shouldn’t have to.

So I owe a gigantic thank you to Mabou Mines “Dollhouse” for assaulting me with their otherworldly production and holding me in that strange emotional place. I certainly wasn’t allowed to retreat to my maze-like mind during the show, what with the miniature furniture and masked nightmare people (who literally terrified me) and everything else. And, to put it out there, the show made me feel, among many things: frightened, nauseous, frustrated, melancholy, and conflicted as all hell. Not conflicted as a theatre artists, but as a person, for a ton of reasons. The motherhood question in the play being one of them…and that’s a conflict inside myself that I didn’t even realize I HAD until I saw this production!

This isn’t to say that Mabou Mines’ “Dollhouse” was my favorite play on planet earth – sure, there were things that put me off in a person-of-the-theatre way. There were elements that made me raise my eyebrow in question. But all in all, in this jumble of crazy thoughts and feelings I have in reaction to the production, I know for certain that “Dollhouse” was somehow just the piece of theatre I needed to see now. As the theatre artist looking to leave her head and get to back to the basics of her gut and her heart, and as the person.

One of the questions I’ve been exploring this semester is what I desire to become as a result of my theatrical training. I don’t want to speak in terms of “defining” my future role in the world of theater, but sometimes it is difficult not to. The conundrum that I’m in is whether or not I wish to be called, first and foremost, an “artist.” It sounds like a simple problem, but believe me – this is not so (at least as far as my process is concerned). I struggle with this notion because I like to think of myself primarily as a storyteller. What drives me as an actor is the conveying of thoughts, images, and words within the context of a bigger picture. I’m less concerned with what I do and say on stage, and more interested in how, as a singular actor, I fit into the world of the plays I’m involved in. Now, this could seem like comparing apples to apples, because certainly, anyone who considers themselves an artist would likely share the same concerns. But to myself, personally, the idea of being an “artist” implies an attitude towards the work that doesn’t quite jive with my perceptions on what theater can and should be.

This is probably why I struggled so greatly with Dollhouse this past weekend. It struck me as art for the sake of art, and not for the sake of its audience; the performance was visually and aurally striking, and certainly held my attention, but I was left feeling rather empty. It’s like that feeling you get when you gorge yourself on carbohydrates and then feel hungry two hours later, regardless of how much you consumed. When I left ArtsEmerson, I felt as though I had seen something of great significance. So why can’t I put a name to that significance, two days later?

I must clarify immediately that the production was, by no means, a bad one. Each actor had a deep physical connection to their characters, and the sets – I mean, there are no words to describe some of the stage pictures I witnessed Saturday night. But I found my reaction, and the audience’s collective reaction, far more fascinating than the play itself. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. I enjoyed the way the performance challenged my perceptions and presented something new. Yet I didn’t understand the significance of the text itself. If Dollhouse had been a movement piece, or an opera of sorts (in its entirety), I would have been far more receptive to its style, but it wasn’t either of these things. Ibsen’s text was still retained, and I came to see a play, to witness the telling of a story. I could not have been more engaged in the action on stage, but I feel like I barely caught the basics of what actually happened to the characters over the course of two and a half hours. Perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, however, I still don’t feel like I had any sort of investment with the characters at the end of the night.

That may very well have been the point of the whole thing. Exaggerated, doll-like actors re-enacting a classic play in the confines of their over-sized dollhouse. I’d like to think that my reaction is what Mabou Mines was trying to coax from audience members like myself. If that is the case, then they were entirely successful. But what if they weren’t? What if the entire point of the production was to loom over its audience like the nurse-on-stilts and mock their confusion, instead of inviting them in to experience it fully? That’s what scares me about referring to myself as an “artist:” because when I think of performers as “artists” in the classical sense, my mind immediately jumps to productions like Dollhouse which have left me utterly confused.

Writing this feels almost like trying to recall a dream, something that slips away faster the more I try to put it into words. I’m not sure what happened the other night in that production. I don’t even think I walked away knowing the plot line (having never read the play) but what happened in the performance was so symbolically explosive, so charged with deep, dark energy, so ludicrous and so mind boggling, so specific and so expertly choreographed that I found myself sitting with my mouth agape for most of the performance. The strange thing is that this isn’t a type of theatrical experience that I would have considered myself drawn to let alone blown away by. I tend to have this die hard notion of theatre as being for the people! Telling them a story that will alter and affect them (in a verbal way is my assumption). But this! This play! The most moving images and stirring scenarios in the play for me were the ones that took place in silence, usually involving 15 foot tall nurses loping along in skull masks. THE POWER OF THE THEATRE! DAMN! It is not the mere written word, or the spoken word, it’s a bank of puppets 60 foot by 50 foot bank of puppets raising their arms simultaneously. The power of the theatre to move and affect people is in the slow unraveling of a piece of red velvet cloth, in the removing of a wig in the small fragment of red paper that falls, unexpectedly from the somewhere up in the rafters, it was in these moments that the audience gasped and sighed. I’d forgotten that this world that I’m setting off into is not merely about the power of words, it truly is about the power of action. The words may motivate action but the action is where the audience becomes viscerally involved instead of merely intellectually involved. This is too much for some people, some don’t wish to be viscerally engaged, it costs the audience something, there were people who left “Dollhouse” after intermission, but as for me I think the whole mass catharsis thing the Greeks had worked out is where the good stuff is. If the theatre is becoming merely an intellectual experience then it is dead, is is something that can be written and read, something that doesn’t need to be experienced. Mobou Mines and “Dollhouse” made me realize that we’re not dead, that our only hope for this art form to live on is if we provide people with something that they can’t read, can’t merely observe, consider or think about but something that they have to experience fully. We memorize through books but we learn through experience, learn who we are, learn about the world, this is what the theatre should give people, this is what it can give people.

I’m subtly angry about this fact. I don’t really care whether I enjoyed this production or not (and I can’t really decide what my overall experience was) but god damn it I don’t want to think about my views on theatre while I watch theatre! Ok, maybe not subtly angry.

My experience of the show was varied. There were things I understood but mostly I didn’t and those pieces I’m still chewing on. This is great and it’s because of the overall meta-theatricality of the show, but most of those pieces have to do with theatre and not with any kind of inner/societal activation I’m feeling. After the production I didn’t say much, but instead I wanted to hear what other people thought to help me process my own. The conversation turned towards the narrative and the choices that were made in that sense, which surprised me, because it wasn’t at all where I was at the moment. In fact I realized I hardly cared about the story or the characters in the journey of this show. Now, if this is a choice, I don’t mind it, but the production so overtly advertises itself as a show about the societal conflict between men and women and I wasn’t activated in any strong way regarding that issue. So, around the end of the evening, the only question I asked was if people felt sympathetic towards Nora. Most said yes. When I said that I didn’t and in fact that I didn’t put, I forget my exact wording but Ilana remembers I’m sure, any blame on the men either there were audible gasps. What is bothering me after this production is why I wasn’t moved in that way. I feel as if I must be lacking some ability for intake for me to have completely missed the empathetic relationship that my comrades seemed to have had.

Where do I find fault, or can I find fault or should I find fault in my relationship with this production? I know it is possible for me to have an empathetic relationship with a lead character, and to be completely immersed in story, because it’s happened. Though it happens rarely. What I want to know though is if this has to do with how I enter the theatre, or with the theatre that I’m presented with. My goal is to be on this journey. I WANT to be moved by theatre, but so often I find that I’m not, and instead of discussing the issues in the piece, I’m discussing the issues of the piece. This blog post basically.

It’s a weird line for me to walk. Sometimes I feel like a new generation of theatre maker because I’m so often displeased, or more accurately, unfulfilled, with the theatre that I see, and sometimes I feel like I must be the biggest asshole in the world.