Little Labors

A Doll’s House

I once saw a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which all the characters except for Nora were played by small people, by a midget, a dwarf, a person with Williams syndrome… This made stark the power that the childlike Nora, the wife and mother, really did have. I can still hear the enormous woman asking her very small and angry husband for some chocolates.

However I have only heard of and seen one performance of A Doll’s House in which, at a certain moment, the audience literally gasped — and it was not at this version but at a straightforward performance. The gasp came when, in the second act, a real live baby was brought onto the stage. I don’t think even a live bear would have elicited as much of a reaction; I once saw a magic show in a theater and at the end of the show a live elephant showed up on stage, and I can report that the reaction to the elephant was considerably less than the reaction to the baby. Why was the baby on stage such a force? Because it might cry? Maybe it was the simple thrill of cameo: a baby seems indisputably from everyday life, and everyday life, though depicted on stage, also feels conspicuously absent from it. The actors other than the baby, if the baby can be termed an actor simply by context, seemed suddenly neon in their falseness, which in turn made them seem real, as if visible backstage, brushing their teeth, watching Mad Men on a laptop. In the original Ibsen script, there is no baby, there are just young children.