Lucas Hnath on writing A Doll’s House, Part 2::

I’ve always loved the play ( A Doll’s House), and I had seen it in many productions, and I mean, the first thing that came to me was the title.  As a joke, I told somebody I was going to write A Doll’s House, part 2 – something about the title made me giggle, and felt a little naughty.  It wasn't until I started writing it that I had to really get serious and get past the joke of the title and really consider what does it mean to revisit the story?

I think the thing that Ibsen kept coming back to in all of his plays is how are we not free and how could we be more free and is that really truly even possible? And he was a writer who seemed to yearn for people to be more free, to be less constricted by social norms, social judgment. So I think "A Doll's House" is part of his consideration of it. And one of the things he is thinking about in this play is the roles that men and women fall into playing or are forced to play. And so Nora's action at the end is to break out of a certain expectation.

The marriage between Nora and Helmer… they are two people who are stepping around each other. They don’t want to get into a fight. They want everything to just be nice and comfortable. And it’s all that avoiding of the difficult stuff, the anger, that seemed to me to be the real problem in their marriage. And so that created a mandate for the sequel: they need to have it out.

It’s interesting, in studying Ibsen, in studying how his plays are received in Norway, something that I often read, is that in Norway, people are laughing riotously at his plays. There’s  something about when you have incredibly high stakes, and people are being compelled to be honest, that creates a kind of comedy.  And I did think that contemporizing the language would make those moments of telling the truth a bit more immediate, and therefore funny.