Review: A tradwife shocks in Guthrie’s explosive ‘Doll’s House’

Everyone knows the moment’s coming but foreknowledge does not lessen the shock.

Eight years into a marriage where she has been belittled and petted like a chirpy bird, would-be tradwife Nora looks for understanding, even reciprocity, from the husband whose life she saved in an act of desperate, law-skirting creativity.

But instead of seeing her as a deeply caring hero, the densely self-absorbed Torvald Helmer stews in the compromising downsides of her bravery and volcanically erupts at her.

The scene is one of several visceral jolts in Tracy Brigden’s riveting production of “A Doll’s House,” which opened Thursday to launch the Guthrie Theater’s new season.

Long before women’s liberation, “Doll’s House” celebrated a woman’s radical departure from a kind of domestic prison. Nora experienced the birdcage of traditional marriage and said that there has to be something else.

She’s still trapped in Amy Herzog’s modernized version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic. The Norwegian master would recognize the sturdy bones of his work at the Guthrie but might have something to say about Herzog’s updates, which are clever and contemporary and sometimes flow like a TV comedy.

Herzog has juiced up the language and upped the stakes by having Nora be more entangled in the stuff of the world. Brigden and her excellent cast, headlined with quicksilver brilliance by Amelia Pedlow, milk the text for maximum laughs.

But the director’s biggest wins are in casting and design. Pedlow is thoroughly captivating as Nora. In the first act, she flits from one excited thought to another, not quite like a nervous Nelly but clearly unsettled, if not a fugitive. It’s as if her contradictory thoughts are getting physicalized in her arms, legs and face.

Her Nora seems less bent on deceit than on self-rescue. She’s carrying and sorting narratives of things that bind her in the world and things that she would like to will into it. With words that alternately dance and coo, Pedlow lets us into Nora’s restive psyche and carries us along on a journey yearning for therapeutic release.

David Andrew Macdonald imbues Torvald with his own contradictions, bringing his charisma and a dancerly grace to the rising bank manager. But that elegance is a cover for a savage soul who delivers his cuts with heartfelt charm.

It’s hard to say who is most unnerving of the men and the different scales of masculinity that they represent. Torvald is blithely unaware of his misogynistic blindsides. But his blackmailing schoolmate Nils Krogstad (Ricardo Chavira) seems more driven by a feral hunger than by the sexism that benefits him.

Chavira gives Nils a spring-loaded desperation, helping us to see his fight for dignity. There’s also a question about him, and whether that character can be tamed.

On the design front, Luciana Stecconi’s holiday-set scenography is spare but evocative. It includes the inside of the Helmers’ green-tinted home that has a chaise, a chair and an ottoman below an unremarkable chandelier. And the whole thing sits in snow as if floating in clouds.

Trevor Bowen’s costumes are similarly illustrative, with Nora, Kristine and nanny Anne-Marie (George Keller in a small role with potent presence) trapped in dark, long, floor-length dresses that constrict and curtail their movements, and the men in tightly wound or loose suits that match their temperaments and stations.

Still, “Doll’s House” has one perplexing costume design choice. Nora’s dress for the party is much talked about. But when we finally see it, it has color and is comparatively freeing but lacks the wow factor.

Even if it comports with Nora’s mental state — that she will no longer please the eyes of onlookers — it’s still a letdown.

No matter, Nora lives as much in the house as in her imagination, the place where she dreams of better worlds and plots her escape. And with her cooing like Maya Angelou’s famously caged bird, this “Doll’s House” lets us see how and why this flighty creature sings.

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.