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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us, whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or On-Demand. On the show today, celebrating Women's History Month with conversations with some of our favorite female guests of the past few months. We'll hear from author, Margaret Atwood, about her new short story collection, and also from one of the only Black female art gallery owners in New York City. That's in the future. First, let's get this started with Jessica Chastain and the Broadway revival of A Doll's House.

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Currently, at the Hudson Theatre, the Academy Award-winning actor Jessica Chastain is starring in the feminist play many have read in lit class, A Doll's House. In the play which was written in 1879 and is set in 19th-century Norway, Chastain plays the iconic character, Nora, the show's protagonist. Nora lives a normal domestic life as a wife and mother, but she's hiding a secret from her husband, and the truth is slowly revealed. This revival is based on a new script from playwright Amy Herzog, and directed by Jamie Lloyd.

Earlier in March, as part of our series, Feminist Fridays, Chastain and Herzog joined us in studio to chat about the production. What better way to kick off our show today honoring Women's History Month than hearing from the two of them again? Alison started by asking Amy, what was some aspect from the original place she knew she wanted to maintain, and what was something she wanted to evolve.

Amy Herzog: I've loved the play for a long time, and so I didn't approach it in a 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, and 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 a very slow merry-go-round kind of, 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 this 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. 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 this 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, and that goes on to the stage and the performances, but what it does with when I'm looking at the audience, I'm connecting to the audience energetically so they become part of the performance.

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

Jessica Chastain: Well, 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 Scenes from a 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, and so 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 an abstract Nora, it was Jessica's Nora, which I could picture, having worked with her.

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

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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. I felt, as I was working with this literal translation, which was prepared by Charlotte Barslund, because I don't read Norwegian, like I was trying so hard to understand with every line what it was that Ibsen was trying to do, and 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. 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: Well, I had seen some of Jamie Lloyd's work. I saw Cyrano, which was fantastic-

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Jessica Chastain: -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 and saying, "Okay, 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 in saying, 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, and 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: There's no-- you all look like you could be going to a gallery opening. Everybody is 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 your there as different than of 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 food eating, food acting is the easiest acting because you just say your lines and you eat, and it's, you don't have to think about what you're doing, or when you have a prop, it takes you away from yourself.

In this sense, with the costumes, with the set, with how Jamie has 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 Theatre 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 that's just about feeling trapped. There's also, for me, the incredible presence of Nora so close to you and so available to the audience the whole time, but, yes, 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 that where Nora's avenues out of her problem are getting fewer and fewer as the play goes along, so I think that's a big part of it. Yes, absolutely she's trapped by the marriage, by the morays of the time, by the expectations of women, and 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, and that's what's 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, and 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, well, 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 Oak. 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 him. In the casting conversations were fascinating, and I think what Oak 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, and 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 mustache-twirling Victorian villain because he comes in and he threatens the heroin and he's the reason that her life falls apart.

I think you can't watch Oak's performance and the way Jessica is working with Oak and not feel like these are two people who are essentially the same, who have been treated entirely differently by society. I think 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. It is, in some sense, as 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 Oak, 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, no physical contact and he's facing the other, he's facing--

Jessica Chastain: I know. It came to be because we were in a rehearsal, and Oak did it.

Amy Herzog: Oh, really?

Jessica Chastain: Yes. Jamie calls it drafts where the actors get to explore something. We did one where Oak decided to sit like that in the scene, and I was like, well, that definitely can't happen, can it? 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 and 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, but of course, as an actor, again, it's another situation where you're like, okay, here I am and I think--

Amy Herzog: A refrain I heard a lot in rehearsal as you saying to Jamie, I trust you.

Jessica Chastain: I know.

Amy Herzog: Because he'd asked you to do these things that are so 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.

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

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?

Amy Herzog: 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. That, to me, is a beautiful reaction. If you can go see any kind of art in theater, paintings, any galleries, any kind of-- what I did find 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 in 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.

Kerry Nolan: That was Alison's conversation with actor Jessica Chastain and playwright Amy Herzog about their revival of A Doll's House, which is running at the Hudson Theater through June 10th.

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Next, we'll hear from the creative team behind the movie Women Talking, which is adapted from the bestselling novel of the same name.

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