STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTO BY KIRSTEN SHULTZ

The Liberty Theatre has taken us on quite the odyssey this past month.

The Hailey theater company revisited Henrik Ibsen’s controversial 1879 play, “The Doll House,” in a 2.5-hour play reading that ended with “the door slam heard around the world.” Then they staged a play about the play—“A Doll House, Part 2”--to show audience what might have happened to Nora after she walked out on her family 15 years earlier.

It was an interesting journey, and one that ends at 7 tonight with the final staging of Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at The Liberty Theatre. (You need not have seen Ibsen’s original play to enjoy the 1979 telling.

Naomi McDougall Jones played the part of Nora and Joel Vilinsky her husband Torvald in the reading of Ibsen’s play. Required reading during high school and college for many in the audience, it has long been considered one of the opening salvos in the quest towards feminism.

Unbeknownst to her husband, Nora has borrowed money to take her husband to Italy to recuperate from a life-threatening illness. She forged her father’s signature days after his death since women were not allowed to take out loans in those day. And, since, she has slowly repaid the debt.

All goes well until a man Torvald wants to fire tries to blackmail Nora by threatening to reveal her crime if she does not stop Torvald from firing him. Long story short…Nora tells her husband everything and he becomes outraged, declaring that she has ruined his reputation and that she’s unfit to be a mother but that he’ll stay married to her for appearances’ sake.

He reneges on that, telling her that he’ll take care of his “little songbird” when the blackmailer backs off. But it’s too late—Nora decides that Torvald has treated her like a doll to be played with and admired all these years. And she leaves him and her bourgeois life to find herself, leaving audiences to wonder what might happen to her.

In “A Doll’s House, Part 2” Nora—in the person of Aly Wepplo—returns to the “doll house” she left 15 years earlier. Decked out in a stylish hat and period skirt and jacket, Wepplo sashays into the house confident that she has found her voice since going out on her own.

Turns out, she has written a wildly successful book about her former life under a pseudonym. And, in doing so, she’s discovered that many other women have experienced this same dismissive attitude from their husband and society.

Claudia McCain portrays the maid, who seems to admire Nora for leaving yet is unable to take her own steps to emancipation. “Where would your children be, if I hadn’t been here to raise them?” she asks, having left her own son to work for Torvald and Nora.

Annabelle Lewis plays her daughter Emmy who is bitter and confused, telling her mother, “I thought you were dead.” And then there’s Torvald, played by Neil Brookshire, who doesn’t even recognize his wife when he enters the house.

He elicits moments of sympathy, even while mired in the patriarchal society of his times.

Want to see how it all comes out? Get tickets for tonight’s show at https://www.libertytheatrecompany.org/events.