Tag Archives: Matt Cosper

Make the Speech and Slam the Door – Again?

**Review: A Doll’s House, Part 2 at The Mint Museum**

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you make a brief study of Henrik Ibsen’s original script – going beyond the Wikipedia write-up – you can get a good understanding of how playwright Lucas Hnath went about imagining his 2017 sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2. Crack open the 1879 original, published the same year it was premiered, and you’ll find that Hnath plays fast-and-loose with the text, even before Ibsen’s characters speak. The architecture of the house is changed when Nora Helmer returns 15 years later to the place where she delivered the feminist “door slam heard around the world.” That iconic door is now emphatically displayed, rather than concealed, in Hnath’s reimagining of the scene where Nora liberated herself by simply walking out on her husband Torvald and their children.

This time, she knocks insistently rather than daintily ringing a doorbell offstage. Once she enters, received by her antique nanny Anne Marie, she notices several items are gone, including her piano, an old cuckoo clock, a cabinet with trinkets, and a portrait of Mom. But only the piano was actually there when Ibsen set the scene, and Hnath is treating Henrik’s stage directions as cavalierly as a modern stage director.

At the Mint Museum on Randolph, where Charlotte Conservatory Theatre is presenting the Queen City premiere, director Matt Cosper accurately gauges Hnath’s irreverence toward the papa of mod drama. But that doesn’t hinder Cosper from pushing the envelope a little further, by unleashing Gina Stewart to be the most skittish and hyper-fretful Anne Marie we can imagine – with a bit of hyperventilating slathered on. As the limping, desiccated nanny of yore becomes Nora’s sounding board once again, every juicy and exotic disclosure that Kellee Stall makes in the role about her tribulations and triumphs over the intervening 15 years becomes exponentially more scandalous, outre, and delicious by virtue of the old crone’s overreactions.

Cosper gives Stewart some extra business to accent her energy and curiosity, some laundry drudgery for starters as Nora is knocking on the door. Then as the wanderer opens up to her, Anne Marie is hungrily chewing on munchies or nibbling on the luxurious chocolate bonbon Nora has brought her, visibly devouring each scrap of news she hears. There’s a nibbling squirrel in both Ibsen’s Doll’s House and Hnath’s, but this time it isn’t Nora.

So exactly how has Nora thrived over these past years? For Stall arrives in a dress so resplendent, thanks to costume designer Beth Killion, that she evokes the majesty of a Macy’s Parade float or the Chrysler Building. Stretching the suspense, Nora asks Anne Marie to guess. This is fun, she remarks, bringing back more memories of Ibsen’s opening scene.

In Anne Marie’s first guess and in Nora’s subsequent revelation, we get keen glimpses into how deeply Hnath dived into Ibsen’s creation. Once you skim the Wikipedia write-up, after all, you realize that Nora is based on the marital turbulence of a writer, Laura Kieler, whom Ibsen knew well. By revealing Nora as a successful writer, Hnath is taking his cue from Ibsen, and by stealing Ibsen’s story, he exacts revenge on Kieler’s behalf, for the Norwegian novelist always resented the Norwegian playwright’s use of her story. (In real life, Mr. Kieler had his missus committed to an insane asylum.)

It’s kind of tasty.

Never guessing that her dear Nora had literary talent, Anne Marie guesses that she became an actress – a shrewd and prescient guess that will mirror Hnath’s thinking when Nora and Torvald thrash out their failed marriage. For the great fault – or fault-line – in Ibsen’s play has always been the wide gulf between the cheery and complaisant little magpie who charms Torvald in Acts 1 and 2 only to become an unbending and defiant crusader against her husband and society after the second intermission.

Famed New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr pointed out this chasm in his analysis of the 1971 Broadway revival of the play, and he celebrated Claire Bloom’s approach to Nora as an effective way to bridge the gulf. What Kerr inferred from Bloom’s performance is pretty much what Hnath has Nora saying out loud in her final showdown with Torvald: the cheery, charming Nora that her husband remembers so fondly was largely a mix of playacting and manipulation, subterfuges that the new Nora disdains.

Shawn Halliday is as stodgy and respectable as the Torvald Helmer of old, but Hnath has given him fresh insights and self-delusions to play with – and to help Hnath in texturizing Nora a bit further. Ironically, the woman who went on to writing books that have espoused the end of marriage, inspiring other wives to walk out on their husbands, has soured Torvald on the idea of marriage simply by walking out and staying away.

“You sorta killed that for me,” he confesses.

There’s also 15 years of hurt for Halliday to harp on – and for Stall to coolly deflect. Cosper allows Halliday to play the victim card way past the brink of comedy as he turns his chair away from Stall, like a pouting child who will not speak until Nora explains why she has returned. With the exception of the elaborately decorated front door, Tom Burch’s simple set design veers as much toward hospital waiting room as it does toward a doll’s house. But when the two simple white chairs, seemingly stolen from a patio or a beach, come into the action on a matching white rug, the smallness of the Mint stage accents the husband-and-wife role reversal beautifully, especially Master Torvald’s regression.

Clearly, the best of Torvald’s grievances goes straight to her walkout. Disarmingly, he admits that Nora had made some good points before she left, but if they really hadn’t had a serious conversation on a serious subject during their whole marriage, it should have been imperative for them both to attempt to have an adult conversation right then, on the spot, aimed at building the marriage that should have been.

Nora doesn’t wish to have the what-about-the-kids conversation, but Hnath doesn’t let her off the hook. The passage of time allows him to bring Emma Helmer, Nora’s daughter, to maturity as essentially a fresh creation. It’s another plum role, and Laura Scott Cary makes a scintillating debut in it, offering Nora the most devastating pushback she gets all evening.

When Emma claims she bears no ill will toward her mom, Cary is so intelligent, poised, and tastefully dressed that we can’t be sure if she’s telling the truth. A wee bit doll-like? It would be easy to presume that Emma has been molded by the strictures Anne Marie and Torvald live by, perhaps processed through the smarts and spirit she inherited from Nora. Yet Cary lets us see with steely clarity that she is not intimidated by her notorious mom. Better yet, she lets Nora see that her absence, more than anything else, has cemented her daughter’s belief in the benefits of marriage and family.

Poof, Nora’s claim that marriage will be an extinct institution within 30 to 40 years, which instantly draws laughs from the audience as Hnath leverages history, now deflates before Nora’s eyes in the confines of her old doll’s house. Quite a supreme irony for someone who has picked up a torch on a mission to change society.

Every time somebody onstage lets loose with an f-bomb, we’re reminded that Hnath’s historical perspective fuels this dramatic comedy. Ibsen denied that he intended A Doll’s House as a feminist play, but Hnath hardly needs to bother making this claim. If anything, he might need to defend himself against the charge that, as exemplified by Anne Marie and Nora, he’s telling us that women don’t know what they want. No, you will not find the answer to why Nora returns in this review. The best way to find out what is driving Nora – and to experience all the shocks she delivers and receives – is to watch how Hnath’s rewarding sequel unfolds at the Mint Museum Randolph. Perhaps the better question to ask, after seeing this beautifully balanced Charlotte Conservatory Theatre production, is whether Nora will ever take yes for an answer

Cosper’s Take 2 on Genet’s “The Maids” Is a Keeper

**Review: XOXO Presents The Maids at The Mint Museum**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Why hasn’t Absurdism ever taken root in America as it has across Europe? After analyzing the plays of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Jean Genet in his renowned study, The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin briefly pondered the question. What America seemed to lack, according to Esslin, was the deep disillusionment that sprouted up in the UK and France, the epicenters of Absurdism, as they languished in the lingering ashes of World War 2.

On this side of the Atlantic, we still had a strong sense of meaning and purpose, for the American Dream still flourished during the Ike Age. Watergate, Vietnam, and Edward Albee hadn’t yet dented our optimism – or our tough, leather-clad cynicism – while Absurdism percolated abroad.

Well, 75 years after the premiere of Genet’s The Maids, disillusionment and despair seem to be the most unifying features of American life. Coin of the COVID realm. So the times could hardly be riper for the gestation of new Absurdist playwrights in the Land of the Free, though inhabitants of MAGA World may have gotten a head start in their alternate universe.

Certainly, The Maids should be considered in-season at the Mint Museum, where a stylish and purposeful XOXO production is running through August 14. We’ve waited long enough: since I last reviewed The Maids in 2002, we’ve hardly heard a peep around here from Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett, or Genet.

Over the past 35 years, Charlotte’s main proponents of the notoriously criminal Genet – thief, prostitute, smuggler, deserter – have been UNC Charlotte, where I saw The Balcony and The Maids in the late ‘80s, and Matt Cosper, who directed both the 2002 edition of The Maids at the Hart-Witzen Gallery and the current effort in the Mint’s Van Every Theater. Imprisoned many times, “Saint Genet” (as Sartre called him) could have easily fit Esslin’s profile of disillusionment and despair.

Yet a look at Genet’s most notorious works (add The Blacks to those suspects I’ve already named) shows the Frenchman to be subversive, nihilistic, angry, rebellious, wickedly sarcastic, and restlessly playful. At the same time, The Maids is an especially oblique and mercurial text, tough on readers and even tougher on actors, directors, and audiences.

In his second shot at presenting Genet, Cosper takes the script by the scruff of the neck and bends it to his will, making the action more sensational and surreal, adding musical interludes for the sister maids, and taking charge of the denouement and the final tableau, making the experience easier for us to take in. With an outstanding set and lighting from production designer Will Rudolph, and with composer Shannon J Hager’s sound design deepening the spell, this may be the richest theatre experience we’ve had at the Van Every.

Rudolph captures the Louis-Quinze ambiance prescribed for Madame’s boudoir with his furnishings and eclipses the playwright’s wildest imaginings with his follow-through on Genet’s call for flowers-flowers-everywhere ornamentation. We seem to be watching Madame dressing up and admiring herself more convincingly here, waited on by her maid Claire, than we did at the Hart-Witzen 20 years ago. Yielding partway to Genet’s perverse suggestion that men play all three roles, Cosper had one man onstage as the action began.

Not this time. We can see in our playbills that this is an all-female cast, but we still might think there’s a misprint even if we recognize Kadey Ballard and Kate McCracken when they first appear. It’s not long before Cosper’s players let us know that things are more than a little out of whack. 5680C148-E886-464F-88DA-28A0326C5891

Two-time Blumey Award winner McCracken is noticeably histrionic, sometimes almost operatic as Madame, preening herself and striking attitudes. Ballard, QC Nerve’s 2021 Best Singer-Songwriter, is even more bizarre, veering as Claire from Southern drawl to bossy Irish brogue and then to a French accent. Then she shifts from sweet maid to bossy dominatrix, slapping Madame hard in her expensively powdered face.

Then an alarm clock goes off, bringing the ritual to a halt, and soon afterward, the phone rings – another sudden reversal that further excites and confuses us because it discombobulates the sisters. We gradually understand that two maid sisters, Solange as Claire and Claire as Madame, have been playacting while Madame is away, fondling their mistress’s jewelry, modeling her dresses and lingerie, building toward the climax in the sisters’ fantasy when they will murder Madame.

But the alarm going off startles them, signifying that the real Madame is returning from her nocturnal partying. The telephone call brings news that Madame’s beloved Monsieur, whom they have cleverly contrived to send to prison – apparently an easy chore in Genet’s world – has been released on bail. The delicious jig-is-up panic between Ballard and McCracken, seasoned with a desperate mix of sisterly animosity and solidarity, weaves a wonderful red carpet for Jennifer Adams to make a serenely regal entrance upon as the true Madame.

And indeed, an exit door from the theater opens and Adams descends three straight flights of stairs to join the quaking siblings, instantly and effortlessly establishing her superiority and dominion. Adams is the diva that McCracken has pretended to be, her crises are as big as life, maybe bigger, and her dictates are to be followed.

Or at least Madame’s tragic and operatic sufferings are real until Claire stupidly blurts out that Monsieur has been released. In the blink of an eye, the air of fantasy and seething underclass resentment turns into a movie thriller predicament. Now if Claire doesn’t kill the real Madame before she gets to have a tête-à-tête with the liberated Monsieur, her mistress might get to the bottom of why her beloved was thrown into jail, and the two complicit maids could be facing some prison time of their own.

It’s urgent, for the impulsive Madame plans to rush out and rendezvous with Monsieur immediately, past midnight, at a designated place.

The 20-year interval since my last experience with The Maids was enough for me to have forgotten the outcome, even if Cosper weren’t bent on changing it. Curiously enough, the comical vibes from the three extravagant performances allowed me to feel a certain amount of detachment. After all, if the bumbling maids couldn’t manage to knock off Madame in multiple roleplaying sessions, what could we expect when it all had to become real, outside their hurriedly aborted play-within-a-play?

Yes, I could root for the maids because Adams had regally discarded feelings in favor of decorous posturing, her Madame never condescending to display any sort of interior. Cosper flips the chemistry between the females by making his Madame older than her servants, rather than 5-10 years younger as Genet prescribed. Somehow this Madame is less innocent in her imperiousness, more heartless than she might have been in Genet’s mind. The oppression of these maids by their mistress seems more severe.

At the same time, McCracken and Ballard point up the youthfulness and playfulness of the sibs, adding extra edge – and a bit of shock – to McCracken’s sweetly murderous Claire and Ballard’s wickedly cruel Solange. Even if you read Genet’s script tonight, you’ll be surprised tomorrow at the Van Every by how energetically and decisively this duo navigates the changes in mood, tone, and subject in their dialogues. One moment, they are in their ritual roles. Next, they’re themselves, bickering sisters, berating each other as Madame would.

For they admire the mistress they hate.

Late in the playscript, there’s a moment when only the audience should be able to see Claire. It’s a moment where Cosper would need to reconfigure his stage design to comply with Genet’s demands. Instead, he becomes wildly imaginative, with electrifying results. The ghostly, demonic ceremony of flaming despair that concludes The Maids at The Mint remains in the spirit if the lurid script, if not the letter, becoming Genet and Cosper at their best. Perhaps the rogue playwright, beholding this director’s boldness and impudence, would have been as awestruck as we were.