FROM NORA'S HOUSE TO OURS.

`A Doll's House' & `Stonewall Jackson's House'

An armful of Christmas presents launches Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Belasco Theatre) on its perfect dramatic arc. During the course of that trajectory, the early domestic coziness turns itself inside out.

The British actress Janet McTeer needs only thirty seconds of nearly breathless bustling around the pile of presents to establish her thrillingly animated portrait of Nora, Ibsen's fabled heroine. McTeer has won rhapsodic praise and an Olivier award for her performance, and no one who sees the splendid London production, which recently opened in New York, will be surprised. This Nora may have to hide her macaroons under the lid of the piano keyboard, out of husband Torvald's sight, but she is flirtatious and self-aware--she often gives little hoots of sly laughter--and she seems to manipulate Torvald (Owen Teale) about as much as he manipulates her.

Everything in the production seems to gain meaning from McTeer's flurrying movements early in the play, when she flings the lid off a box, and throws a blanket over her head to tease her husband. The rigid posture of Teale, who plays Torvald with great dignity and even a certain appeal, provides as much contrast to McTeer's movements as his long black flock coat does to the blond wood of the set.

At the beginning of act 2, when Nora's troubles over a fraudulent signature have begun to haunt her, McTeer's comparative stillness, as she talks aloud to the Christmas tree she is decorating, instantly reveals the character's inner state. Everything is progressing toward the final moments of the play, when Nora and her husband sit down at a table, in a pool of lamplight, to grapple with their marriage's dishonesty for the first and final time.

Ibsen's subtle craftsmanship reveals this dishonesty, and every other type of moral squalor, even when the marriage seems sturdiest. "There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt," Torvald says at the beginning of act 1, giving his wife a little lecture about cash flow. With its reminder that a home can be not-free and not-beautiful, this remark suggests that the home is already in peril.

The brightness of this production's spare but comfortable parlor, designed by Deirdre Clancy, seems to emphasize the threat--the pale color of the floorboards and the pastel furnishings suggest that gloom and evil have been unnaturally, and not very successfully, banished. An exaggeratedly receding square of ceiling, suspended above the set, makes the scene just a little stylized, just a touch like a doll's house. The snugness of the space makes it all the more shocking when the self-righteously outraged Teale nearly menaces McTeer right off into the left-hand wing.

But hopeful things can happen in this space, too. In the one scene that does not contain McTeer--the dimly lit opening to act 3--wretchedness turns to hope, as the miserable moneylender Krogstad, played with bitter intensity by Peter Gowen, sits in an armchair picking at his fingernails while his long-lost love (Jan Maxwell) offers an end to loneliness. These two can reach across the gulf that separates them, the play hints, because they have lived, suffered, and lost their illusions out in the real world--had the kind of experience Nora is seeking when she walks out of the house in the play's final scene.

Director Anthony Page has said that he hoped his production avoided reducing Nora's rebellion to "a blueprint for female liberation." Certainly McTeer's interpretation makes the conflict much more compelling--the strength she gives Nora precludes such easy answers, and involves us in the examination of the marriage and its failures. With McTeer topping a roster of sterling performances, this is a clear and resonant production.

Independent thinking, and the trials and tribulations of those who attempt it, also furnish the themes for Jonathan Reynolds's provocative satire Stonewall Jackson's House. This very topical play has been something of a succes de scandale since it opened in early spring at the American Place Theater, a forum for new plays by American playwrights. After critics raved about the show's daring skirmish against political correctness, its limited run was extended.

Playwright Reynolds was once a political strategist for Eugene McCarthy, and Stonewall Jackson's House contains some hilarious jibes at the nonprofit theater world, a few pricelessly deadpan monologues, and a good deal of shrewd but long-winded criticism of bleeding-heart liberalism.

The play begins at the house of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, where a wearied African-American tour guide named LaWanda (Starla Benford) is trammeled with a group of particularly noxious tourists. The set's rotating panels present two-dimensional rooms as LaWanda recites a dead-on parody of tour-guide speech, including trivia like Jackson's love of house chores and his feat of once canning ninety-nine heads of cabbage in a single day.

After fantasizing, in an aside, about pre-Civil War days when "at least they all had jobs," LaWanda decides she'd prefer a life without responsibilities, and asks Barney (Ron Faber), a genial farmer from Ohio, to take her on as a slave. The scene dissolves in shrieks of horror as the tour-guide scenario, a la Pirandello, turns out to be a play under consideration by a nonprofit theater, whose liberal directors label the play racist and call the author in to berate him.

For the next act-and-a-half, the culture wars rage as the actors stride around a dilapidated piano, a work table strewn with half-empty bags of potato chips, and other staples of a bleak rehearsal-room set. "How far back should the blame go?" demands a conservative African-American woman (also played, with gusto, by Starla Benford), airing the usual conservative critique of victim mentalities, "Christians and lions? Ostrogoths and Visigoths?" The argument courses--sometimes humorously, sometimes not--from the significance of the L.A. riots to the spiritual legacy of Joseph Campbell, to the plight of Irish immigrants before the Civil War.

Although the diatribes in the play's latter half certainly make their points, Reynolds seems most successful in his apolitical humor. The opening scenes contain priceless moments, such as the parodies of American-history scholarship (an allusion to a book called Tiny Metal Objects of the Civil War) or a sudden paean to the "spiky grass" in Ohio.

But the subsequent debate runs on rhetorical, rather than dramatic, energy. Despite spirited performances by the cast, who transform themselves impressively from one cartoonish character to another, Stonewall Jackson's House may disappoint those who expect the theater of ideas, rather than ideas in a theater. The play was under consideration for this year's Pulitzer prize; ultimately, no prize was awarded in the drama category.

Celia Wren is a frequent Commonweal contributor.