When Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House opened in Copenhagen in 1879, its honest and critical examination of a woman’s lack of options beyond marriage generated quite a scandal. When I was a young actor assigned a scene from the play, Nora struck me as a flighty child. I didn’t like her, and I didn’t like playing her. I didn’t yet understand that Ibsen was making a point about the role that Nora had to play for her husband. Many years later, when I began teaching the play, I discovered a new appreciation for and yearning to direct the play.

In 2018, Stef Smith’s adaptation, Nora: A Doll’s House, opened in the U.K., first in Scotland and then at the Young Vic in London. It is the product of Smith’s long obsession with Ibsen’s original. In it, she re-frames Nora’s story within three different time periods: 1918, 1968 and 2018. The fight for women’s suffrage, the swinging sixties and modern day intertwine in this urgent, poetic play that asks how far have we really come in the past 100 years?

In choosing a specific United States setting for the play, numerous story elements had to be considered, particularly the politics, geography, weather and socio-economics of the city we are in. In the U.S., women’s suffrage and legalized abortion happened on the national scale later than they did in the U.K., and the path to gay rights has been quite different in the two countries. However, after years of activism, the women of Michigan won the right to vote in 1918, and the state was one of the first three to ratify the national amendment in 1919. Given the centrality of this issue to the play, we have set our Doll’s House in Detroit, a city with a prominent river, cold winters and an appropriately bumpy economic history. Certainly, there are historical elements which do not ‘match up’ to Detroit, and I ask the historians in the audience to forgive us those details!

If one thing has been clear throughout our rehearsals, it is that, while the challenges facing Nora in 1879 and 1918 have shifted, they have not evaporated in the past century. Our young actors identify with Nora’s experiences — too much, I fear. If you or someone you know is in search of resources to help navigate the challenges of our world, please see the wonderful list of organizations provided by Shenandoah University’s [Not Just] Women’s Center in this digital program. Meanwhile, I sincerely hope that by 2068 we will no longer need such options, and this play will have become less relevant.

Carolyn Coulson
Assistant Dean for Student Learning
Director of Acting
Associate Professor of Theatre
Shenandoah Conservatory