(Bloomberg) -- For the stark new staging of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which opened on Broadway on March 9, Jessica Chastain gets into character as Nora Hellmer in a highly unorthodox way. She leans back in a hard wooden side chair and surveys the audience as they filter in and take their seats. Staring us down with a piercing gaze, the Oscar-winning strawberry-blond actor, who last appeared on Broadway in 2012 in The Heiress, already has us in her power.

But in truth, she’s about as powerless as can be: Her chair sits on a revolve that slowly twirls her upstage and back, like conveyor-belt sushi. She can’t budge as her curious fans whisper and snap photos with their phones. Chastain’s Nora is a cheetah trapped in zoo. Or in that chair, rather, which she’ll be confined to until the play’s final moments. For the next few hours, she is Ibsen’s prisoner. And ours.

One by one the other actors join her on the bare, ominously revolving stage, and eventually the action begins: It’s Christmas, and Nora is giddy to finally have enough money to buy proper presents for her husband, Torvald (Succession’s Arian Moayed), their children and the servants. Torvald has just been promoted to bank manager, and the pair chatter excitedly about their suddenly bright-looking future. But this is Ibsen, so of course Nora has a secret: Some years ago, she borrowed a great deal of money from one of Torvald’s colleagues, Nils Krogstad (Hamilton’s Okierete Onaodowan), so she could take her husband south to Italy when his health was failing. Now, with freedom almost in sight, Krogstad appears with new threats. 

Whom can she confide in? Not Torvald—he’d be horrified. Or her daily companion, Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), the nanny who raised her and is now raising her children. Perhaps Dr. Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), her best friend? No, because naturally he’s in love with her. (He’s also dying of some unmentionable disease; it is the 1880s, after all.) How about Kristine (Jesmille Darbouze), the old school chum who just turned up mysteriously … ?

Laying out the intricacies of Nora’s predicament—women in the late 19th century weren’t allowed to enter into contracts; the institution of marriage was sacrosanct—A Doll’s House created a firestorm of controversy when it appeared in 1879. Ibsen claimed he hadn’t tried to write a feminist manifesto, even telling Norwegian activists in 1898 that he wasn’t interested in “propaganda,” just giving an accurate “description of humanity.” As the decades pass and women’s rights advance, it becomes easier to take his statement at face value.

A spoiler, in case you’ve somehow managed to never see this beloved play: A Doll’s House is essentially one long setup for a single momentous action. (It’s a narrative structure Ibsen perfected, along with Strindberg and Chekhov, at the end of the 19th century.) The playwright Amy Herzog has deftly streamlined and subtly modernized the text, smoothing out its sometimes Victorian-sounding syntax, but she’s only accentuated the feeling that we’re jogging briskly through forests of exposition toward a mysterious abyss that will swallow us up.

Along the way, she and director Jamie Lloyd almost skip the famous scene where Nora practices the tarantella her husband wants her to dance at a party. In most productions—the famous 1997 revival starring a luminescent Janet McTeer comes to mind—the dance shows Nora on the edge of exploding. Here, jerkily marking through the movements in her chair cell, Chastain seems like she might choke to death instead. It’s strikingly different, but it may work even better. She’s almost suffocating in her desperation.

Lloyd and set designer Soutra Gilmour remove any semblance of the bourgeois dollhouse we usually see in productions of the play. There are no props, either, but the cast makes no clumsy attempt to mime. In fact, the production does away with spatial differentiations entirely. The actors remain onstage throughout, cloaked in chilly, inky-blue costumes (by Gilmour and Enver Chakartash); sometimes they’re waiting in the shadows at the periphery, sometimes they slowly slide by on the revolve. Always they seem just out of earshot, turning every conversation Nora has into a conspiracy. Meanwhile, a large panel of dim lights overhead—Jon Clark’s lighting throughout is intentionally too dark to read by—is ever so slowly dropping, crushing her in a vice. 

Streamlining the text and removing the setting, period and even the action, Lloyd focuses our attention completely on Ibsen, and we find a play that transcends its politics: The system was/is cruel, no doubt, but Nora is also a deeply flawed human being who’s helped to set her own trap.

Lloyd’s vision of Ibsen bears a strong resemblance to the work of Dutch director Ivo van Hove, whose stripped-down classics set the bar for polarizing audiences. The approach requires utter confidence in your cast, and here, to a person, they are flawless. The audience is coming to see Chastain, of course, and she is sensational, performing a sort of exorcism as Nora progresses from naivete to vulnerability to rage to triumph. Screen and stage actors are very different animals. Chastain is the rare artist who’s transcendent in any medium.

The production’s one flaw may be that it works on us almost too well. Like Nora, we’re also trapped in our seats for two hours with no intermission. The lighting is never brighter than twilight, the world onstage is cold, cold, cold, and the theater is needlessly chilly, too. We’re hanging on every word of the Norwegian genius and his brilliant interpreter—the physical and mental challenge of it just doesn’t let up until the last moment. When Nora makes her final grand gesture, the director and designers make their own, and for much of the audience, it’s all too much. The tension breaks—and they laugh.

It may not be what Ibsen or Lloyd or Chastain ever envisioned, but the spell had to be broken.

A Doll’s House plays at the Hudson Theatre through June 10. Tickets available at adollshousebroadway.com

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