There’s so much comedy in A Doll’s House, Part 2 that its serious essence might easily be overlooked. Yet Asolo Rep’s production always clings to the play’s serious core, substantiating its achievement. Under Peter Amster’s direction, it enhances the modernity of Lucas Hnath’s text in dialogue, characters’ conflicting attitudes, and a somewhat open-ended conclusion. With a knock on the door she’d slammed shut as she left 15 years ago, beautiful Kate Hampton’s self-assured, fashionably adorned Nora enters her former house’s semi-circular parlor. Its walls hold traces of emptied out pictures. In one of the few chairs, Anne Marie (Peggy Roeder, crusty, funny, and rightfully bothered), nanny to Nora and then her children, isn’t warm to Nora or her request for her help, even to be well paid for. Nora’s become a wealthy writer of books urging women to be sexually free spirits and glorifying being single and self-supporting through work. She’s returned to get husband Torvald (perfectly portrayed by David Breitbarth as reputedly solid, while actually hurt and confused) to finalize their divorce. She needs legal independence for her right to work and keep her earnings. He, meanwhile, has prospered while thought to be a widower. Their daughter Emmy, who now contemplates a traditional marriage, has her own ideas about helping her mother out. Olivia Osol’s Emmy is in different ways an effective chip off the maternal block. Structured as a series of conversations or confrontations, including a few monologues sharply injected by Hampton’s Nora, the play has each speaker reveal personal choices of how to live one’s life, especially in relation to others. These realistic topics are presented to the audience directly as much as between the conversationalists. Director Peter Amster handles the mixture with aplomb. Ultimately, the play deals with questions of the worth of freedom, of self-actualization, of blending with others to make and be part of a family. Despite its novelties, it still traditionally follows a protagonist into a pursuit that meets with conflict and works out to a climax and resolution for the—in this case—heroine.
