The first student theater production of the year, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, ran for three evening performances in Kellner’s Black Box Theater from Thursday, October 16 to Saturday, October 18. The play, spanning approximately 90 minutes, had a small cast: Madeleine Wu ‘27, John Hackett ‘26, Aava Darvish ‘27, Melody Chen ‘26, Davey Glazer ‘28, Tyla Tsang ‘28, and English teacher and Hallowell House Head Kristine Palmero’s two children, Belly and Poppy.
Ibsen’s 1879 play explores themes of the irony of social, marital, and financial struggles as Nora Helmer (Wu), one of the main protagonists, seems to be living a perfect life as a “doll in a house”—all until her fraudulent past and dirty secret are pushed back into the spotlight. Trapped in this male-dominated world, she navigates her feminism and manipulation.
To Director Peter Parisi, this play was one of the most important pieces of modern Western drama that is produced regularly all over the world. “It was a forward-thinking, psychological, feminist drama that I found very compelling,” he said. “There’s this woman who is caught in this web of domesticity, and she’s a doll in a house. And she has an awakening.”
This year’s production of A Doll’s House was part of the Milton tradition of 1212 Plays, which originated from play readings held in room 1212 in Wigglesworth Hall. Since their founding decades ago, the plays have since moved to the Studio Theatre in Kellner. “[1212] is a program that is really, really important to me,” Parisi said. “When I first started here 30 years ago, these were the first plays that I directed.”
The Performing Arts department made the decision to set the play in an environment different than that of what Ibsen intended, because Parisi felt that “setting it in a contemporary world doesn’t feel realistic, and setting it in the 1800s feels like an obstacle.” Instead, he set the play in the late 1920s in Europe—“somewhere like Germany.”
Moreover, the work behind the scenes done by Costume Designer Amy Fink did not go unnoticed: Alyssa Zheng ‘28 commented, “I think the characters all looked super good. They all prepared really well and their costumes were done very, very well.”
Parisi hoped the actors would feel they have creative freedom, and think of the process as “organic.” He stated, “I like to let the actors make discoveries, and then we craft the performance together. In a play like this, it’s about understanding the objectives, the obstacles, the tactics. My process is lets try things on, lets see what works, lets see what feels authentic.”
When asking the audience for their interpretations of the story, Nora Jin ‘28 felt “[it] was really about the control that men have over women and how at some point in their lives, women have to find a point where they need to break free to truly find a place to be their own human being.”