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Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Allison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, Ben Okri joins us. The British Nigerian Booker Prize-winning novelist has a poetry collection being released in the US for the first time. It's called A Fire in My Head. It includes poems about recent racial justice protests and the Grenfell Tower disaster. He joins us to discuss and has agreed to read some poetry, so that's a huge treat.

Historian author, Susan Wels, will be with us to discuss her book An Assassin in Utopia, the true story of a 19th-century sex cult and the President's murder. It's about the Oneida Community, which was first formed upstate New York in 1848 and intended to be a liberating Utopia. The reality was much darker. Yes, there's a civil war connection. The Frick Collection has temporarily moved one block east and four blocks north to the brewer, plus it's now free for kids. 10 to 17. We'll speak with curator Amy Ang. That is our plan. Let's get this started with a reimagining of a classic play perfect for women's history month.

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Alison Stewart: Lady McBeth, Blanche, Feely, Martha. Those are some of the most revered stage roles for women. Now Academy Award winner, Jessica Chastain, is taking on another legendary character, Nora, the protagonist of A Doll's House. The 1879 work by Henry Gibson was radical for its time causing a stir with its protofeminist themes and portrayal of the constraints marriage can place on women. Now with a new adaptation from Amy Herzog and paired with staging from Director Jamie Lloyd, this century's old play feels like it could be set in 2023.

A quick plot review, it's been a long time since lit class for some of us. Chastain's Nora is a chatty determined woman who is devoted to her children and her dotting and slightly condescending husband, Torvald. They've had money struggles but a recent promotion for Torvald means some comfort. Nora won't have to count every penny before buying the kids' Christmas presents, but Nora has a big secret.

Years ago, she forged documents on a loan to pay for her husband's medical care, and now is being blackmailed by the bank associate who looked the other way. Yes, he works for Nora's husband and will rat her out unless Nora helps him get a better position. With seemingly nowhere to turn for help, Nora becomes increasingly desperate in her search for a way out. A Doll's House is running at the Hudson Theater through June 4th, and I'm joined now by playwright, Amy Herzog. Hi, Amy.

Amy Herzog: Hi, Allison. Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Fresh off her SAG win for George & Tammy, it is Jessica Chastain. Jessica, nice to meet you.

Jessica Chastain: Thank you. Nice to meet you. Happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Amy, what was something from the original DNA of the original play that you knew you wanted to maintain? Then what was something you really thought would be interesting to evolve?

Amy Herzog: I've loved the play for a long time. I didn't approach it in a kind of radical revisionist way. I think there's so much that I wanted to honor about the complexity of the characters and the depth of the relationships. In a way, I think what I wanted to re-approach wasn't so much what Ibsen wrote as the way it's been interpreted and understood for the last century and a half, or whatever since he wrote it. It wasn't like I had to reinvent it so much as reinvestigate some of the things that were already there.

For me, that really meant looking at the way Nora wasn't just a victim of circumstance and a victim of her time, but an active participant in the system that she was born into and was living in. A really canny, smart, interesting, funny person who made the most of her circumstances and for whom it worked for a really long time until it didn't, which I think is a fresher way to think about the ways women are limited not just by outside circumstances but also by the decisions that we make, which may have certain benefits, but ultimately, can trap us.

Alison Stewart: Jessica, your work as an actor starts before the play even starts. You come on stage and you're seated in a chair on a circular revolving stage. For people at home trying to picture, it's like a very slow merry-go-round, but it's a very sparse set. You're out there for a good 15 minutes before the show starts. How does that prepare you for this Nora? How does that prepare the audience for this Nora?

Jessica Chastain: Wow. It's a fascinating exercise when thinking about it. It's interesting for the audience to see Nora in the space as though she's been in this house for a while. What I do is when I'm sitting in the chair, I'm really trying to connect to the audience which is not something normally done in theater. In the past, I've had this fear, this nervousness of people seeing me or whatnot, and I'm out there and I'm sitting and I'm actually really looking at everyone.

In some sense what I've noticed is it's created the space. They can see me but I can also see them. We're doing it together and it feels like-- Jamie Lloyd has this exercise where he creates a grid for the actors where we all feel connected energetically. That goes on to the stage and the performances. What it does when I'm looking at the audience, I'm connecting to the audience energetically. They become part of the performance.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting watching the audience react because at first, everybody wants to take your picture. Then that goes away pretty quickly after and you're wondering, "What is going on with this character? What is she doing on the stage?"

Jessica Chastain: What I'm trying to do is I'm also thinking in terms of Nora as I'm looking out there for the women and also the men, who else is Nora in their circumstances? Who else is, in some sense, playing a part to become palatable to others, and in doing so, aren't experiencing their own authentic truth? I'm really connecting to everyone so they feel like they're going to go on this journey with me.

Alison Stewart: Amy, you've worked with Jessica before on HBO's strange Scenes from Marriage, when you were working on this adaptation, did you have this actor in mind?

Amy Herzog: Yes, we were actually just talking about this. Jamie and Jessica approached me to write the adaptation earlier last year. I knew it was for Jessica, which was a huge gift because it was so concrete and real in my mind. This Nora, it wasn't just like an abstract Nora, it was Jessica's Nora, which I could picture having worked with her.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting, so you have this a little bit of a headstart in a way because you know Jessica's voice, you know her personally, you know the way she works. After that headstart, then what do you do?

Amy Herzog: Gosh. I had a really woo-woo process I have to say that I felt like I was communing with Ibsen, which sounds really ridiculous, but I felt as I was working with this literal translation, which was prepared by Charlotte Barslund because I don't read Norwegian. I was trying so hard to understand with every line what it was that Ibsen was trying to do. As I got deeper and deeper into the play, I felt more and more like I was able to do that, then was just trying to make the language as immediate and contemporary as possible and eliminate as many obstacles to people connecting to the play as possible.

Alison Stewart: Jessica, in this version, this was fascinating to me that the action is never acted out, that the men are supposed to smoke cigars, but we never see them light cigars whenever we see them put their hands up to light cigars. You play with your children, we never see the hide and seek. Nobody hides nobody. We don't even see the children. We just hear them. As you, an actor, what challenges does that pose, and then what opportunities does that afford you?

Jessica Chastain: I had seen some of Jamie Lloyd's work. I saw Cyrano, which was fantastic with James McAvoy. I think he's so incredible at looking at these plays that in the past, in some sense are performed as museum pieces, corsets and petticoats and fan work and all of that in saying, "Why are we doing it today? How does this affect us in this moment? How does it affect every person in the audience? Are we able to hold up a mirror and say, "Yes, this was written almost 200 years ago but why is it still relevant?"

The stakes become higher because it is still relevant. In doing that, his whole way of working is to simplify, simplify, simplify. That's the note he usually gives me. It's, "Simplify." What I've noticed is it just gets me out of my own way. What I can do now is I can speak Amy's incredible adaptation and dialogue and connect with the other actors on stage and also connect to the audience in many ways because we're all telling the story together. Then there's nothing in the way. There's no fan work, there's no petticoats. It's just the reality of what are we playing now. What is happening in this moment?

Alison Stewart: You all look like you could be going to a gallery opening. Everybody's in black and very modern. I thought about that, the costuming, because so often when I interview actors, they talk about the costuming, and the hair can really help them get there. In this case, well, maybe it does help you get there because maybe you're there is different than what Nora has normally been.

Jessica Chastain: I definitely feel more exposed. It's an interesting thing. As an actor, it's very scary what he's created because you can hide behind tricks in other ways. You can hide behind your props or your food. That's a big joke we all have when we're making movies. It's like food eating, food acting is the easiest acting because you really don't-- You just say your lines and you eat, and it's like you don't have to think about what you're doing. When you have a prop, it takes you away from yourself.

In this sense, with the costumes, with the set, with how Jamie staged it all, it's just you. If you are not in the moment of what your character is going through, the audience is going to see it. It's incredibly exposing. It feels like by simplifying, it's like a stripped-down version where you can't hide.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing A Doll's House which is at the Hudson Theater through June 4th. My guests are Playwright, Amy Herzog, and actor, Jessica Chastain. Amy, we see Nora seated in this chair almost the entire performance. What is it that has Nora feeling so trapped? Is it the financial situation? Is it the culture? Is it her own sense of her limitations?

Amy Herzog: I think it's all of the above. I also think that the chair gesture that you're referring to is also open to interpretation. I'm not sure if it's just about feeling trapped. There's also, for me, just the incredible presence of Nora so close to you and so available to the audience the whole time. She's trapped by-- These plays that were written in the 19th century do have this really sturdy structure and dramaturgy. There's a very tightly round plot where Nora's avenues out of her problem are getting fewer and fewer as the play goes along.

I think that's a big part of it. Yes, absolutely, she's trapped by the marriage, by the mores of the time, by the expectations of women. Then, on top of that, what we've been so interested in is by the choices she's made and the decisions she's made to participate.

Alison Stewart: When we first meet Nora, Jessica, how does she feel about her marriage?

Jessica Chastain: Oh, I think when we first meet Nora, she's content. She's cheerful. She's content. She's not aware of the choices she's made or the situation she's really put herself into. That's what's so exciting about the play. As it goes on, she becomes more and more aware. There is a moment when we first meet her, she's content, but also Torvald says in the very first scene, "What's going on with you today?" There is something brewing, which also is very exciting because it's not just these external forces that change Nora. Nora has already started to simmer and become aware of something that she's not even conscious of.

She's also someone who when we first meet her-- It was interesting. It was hard for me to memorize the lines for the first 20 pages. I kept thinking like, "Why am I having so much difficulty with this?" I came to the realization "That part of the play, she really isn't herself." In every scene, every character that she comes into contact with, she is trying to be what she imagines they want her to be. She's trying to be as pleasing and as likable so they will give her what she wants, whatever that is. She is giving them a version of herself that she thinks is the version they want to see. That's why it was so difficult to memorize those lines because it never felt like it was truly her.

Alison Stewart: Amy, the person who's blackmailing Nora is played by Oki-- I never get his last name right.

Amy Herzog: Onaodowan.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Yes. He's been on the show before. People know him as the original Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in Hamilton. I wondered this. I don't know if you wrote it this way. Obviously, he's an African American man and he makes clear the mistakes he make, which are similar to the mistakes that Nora makes, have a huge consequence for him and might not for her. I don't know if that was part of your rewriting it. I don't know if that was part of the casting. I was just very curious if the race conversation came into it.

Amy Herzog: In writing it, no. In writing it, I did not know how Jamie would cast it. The casting conversations were fascinating. I think what Okie is doing is hugely exciting. This to me is the most sympathetic and deepest Krogstad I've seen because it's so clear the way racism has impacted the course that his life has taken. Perhaps he did make a mistake, but it's not a mistake that Nora hasn't made. It is a mistake that has had these huge consequences for him.

I think in his playing of it-- There's a way that the character can function as a, like mustache-twirling Victorian villain because he comes in and he threatens the heroine. He's the reason that her life falls apart. I think you can't, you can't watch Okie's performance and the way Jessica is working with Okie and not feel like these are two people who are essentially the same, who have been treated entirely differently by society. I think that that's a layer that, in a way, is there in the original text, but lives very differently in our 2023 production.

It's fascinating when you say this too, because when you're bringing race into it, but also bringing gender into it, because it's very clear when they say a woman cannot borrow without the permission of her husband. A woman doing something illegal like forging a signature is very extreme. If she is found out-- She even contemplates ending her own life. In some senses, they both committed a similar mistake, but they both understand that society and the people in power work against them.

Alison Stewart: When they first meet or we see them first meet, you are playing with Okie and you are back to back. What is that like to have to play such an intense scene with your scene partner, no eye contact?

Amy Herzog: Oh it's so hard.

Alison Stewart: No physical contact and he's facing the other-- He's facing-

Amy Herzog: I know. It came to be because we were in a rehearsal and Okie did it.

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Amy Herzog: Yes. Jamie calls it drafts where the actors get to explore something. We did one where Okie decided to sit like that in the scene. I was like, "That definitely can't happen. Can it?" [laughs] Listen, he's so talented and he told me he's done a lot of poetry readings where actually the audience can't see his face. You hear his voice and you hear how expressive he is. I can understand why he made that choice and I can understand why people are responding so positively to it. Of course, as an actor, again, it's another situation where you're like, "Okay, here I am." [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: A refrain we hear, I heard a lot in rehearsal as you were saying to Jamie, "I trust you."

Amy Herzog: I know. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Because he'd ask you to do these things that are so scary.

Amy Herzog: Technically challenging and unconventional and scary, but always Jessica was ready to jump into it.

Alison Stewart: I imagine you have to listen differently when you can't see your scene partner.

Amy Herzog: When you take away a sense, your other senses are heightened and perhaps that's why Okie made that choice because it makes us really hear the words in a different way when that's what is available to us of that character. It becomes very strong what he has to say.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing A Doll's House at Hudson Theater through June 4th. My guests are playwright, Amy Herzog, and actor, Jessica Chastain. We're feminists around here. We like to call it Feminist Friday All Month. It's the first week of Women's History Month. Jessica, what do you think this play and the role of Nora has meant to women in theater?

Jessica Chastain: It's so fascinating to me because I was actually a late bloomer to this play. When I was in school, I was very angsty and I wanted to feel all the emotions. I was more drawn to a character like Ms. Julie in Strindberg's Ms. Julie. We've talked about this a little bit. They wrote these incredible parts and both these female characters come to the decision of, "I have to sacrifice myself to save a man," in some sense. Nora and Julie makes different decisions at the end of the play.

I've decided as I've matured that I am so in awe of what Ibsen wrote because I find that in a lot of media, and you see it-- I'm going to be completely honest, you see it in a lot of [unintelligible 00:18:42] cinema, you see a lot of the stereotype of the woman as a martyr and how noble it is that she, in some sense, sacrifices herself for others. I think that is a very dangerous thing to put in the media and for women to be trained to see. I'm incredibly inspired and very grateful to Ibsen for this Nora.

Alison Stewart: What do you think, Amy?

Amy Herzog: I agree with everything Jessica just said. I was also just reflecting how different it is for me to re-approach this play now that I have children and understand just the enormity of the decision Nora makes by choosing herself. It has also made me think-- This is maybe a little bit unrelated, but just of the way Ibsen understood motherhood that there's a lot of talk about Nora playing with her children and how she just plays with them all the time as though that's an inadequate form of motherhood.

To me, playing is the highest form of motherhood. I've had a new sorrow in re-approaching this play and seeing the ways that Nora connects to her children and the ways that that's completely unvalued. I think not only by the world of the play but even by the playwright who wrote of her.

Alison Stewart: Of course, in the original Nora's choice is punctuated by a famous door slam.

Jessica Chastain: Please don't give, I'm going to stop you, don't give away [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: No I wasn't. I promise, I promise. It still could be a door slam. It could just be something that we've heard, we've discussed how the staging is different and unusual, and modern. My question is was it always going to be different than the original, Amy?

Alison Herzog: Oh that is a staging choice. No, I can't take any responsibility for the thing that we will not name right now

Jessica Chastain: For the way Laura goes.

Alison Herzog: No, my brilliant collaborator, Jamie Lloyd, is responsible for, there's just a big question when you approach this play. You know what? Yes, as Shaw said the door slam heard around the world how are you going to recreate the shock of the original, and so Jamie Lloyd found a way.

Alison Stewart: Jessica, what do you hope audiences after they see the show and they go for a cocktail or on their subway ride home are thinking about?

Jessica Chastain: I was just saying this to Amy. My favorite reaction was from a friend of mine, a man who came to see the show. He texted me the next day and he said am I like that? I think I'm like that. He's an incredible person and very thoughtful, and that to me is a beautiful reaction. If you can go see any kind of art, theater, paintings, any galleries, any kind of--

What I think I'm so moving and I'm so thankful for having a life that works in art is, hopefully, it inspires you to examine yourself, and examine your life, and examine the possibilities of what life could be, and your life almost as a dream. The idea that people could come see our show and the women can ask themselves am I Nora? The men can ask themselves am I Nora? People can also ask themselves am I Torvald? This idea that it forces you to look at yourself and wonder, "Am I being the most authentic version of who I am?" I think that's really exciting.

Alison Stewart: A Doll's House is at the Hudson Theater through June 4th. My guests have in playwright, Amy Herzog, and actor, Jessica Chastain. Thank you for coming in today, really appreciate it.

Jessica Chastain: Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: This is All of It.

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