For just four nights, from Nov. 18 to Nov. 22, the Baruch College Fine and Performing Arts Department turned the Bernie West Theater into something rare: not merely a performance space, but the Helmer family’s warm, cramped, festive and quietly suffocating 1961 living room. 

The production’s reimagining of the Henrik Ibsen play did more than just move the clock forward. It placed the family on the cusp of the feminist movement’s second wave, the civil rights movement and emerging LGBTQ+ liberation, inviting the audience to watch old truths collide with new possibilities.

FPA faculty member and play Director Christopher Scott had the audience inhabit the very home, rather than watching it from afar. The aisles served as pathways for the actors, who entered and exited through freestanding doors set at the corners of the space. Stockings on the mantel, a glowing Christmas tree and different holiday vinyls spinning on a record player perfectly grounded the setting of Christmas Eve. 

This intimate staging heightened the sense of being inside Nora Helmer’s carefully curated dollhouse, where she is the only toy.

The play opens as Nora Helmer, played by Paz Morán, a senior at Baruch, comes rushing into the scene with a large bag full of gifts for her children. 

Nora Helmer lives her life as if it is a constant performance. She plays the rehearsed role of a happy wife in front of her husband, who only wants the best for himself and their children. 

Morán infused the character with nervous energy: the secret nibbling of chocolate, the compulsive optimism and the desperate taking of pills to create a portrait of a woman performing happiness more than feeling it. 

Anne-Marie, the household nanny played by Baruch alum Rachelle Hernández, makes it clear from the start that the household is not what it seems. Every character carries secrets, and each moment pushes those truths closer to exposure.

The audience is quickly exposed to the harsh reality of the time regarding gender roles when the audience is introduced to Nora’s old friend, Kristine Linde, played by Baruch student Madison Belisle. 

Kristine recently became a widow, leaving her with no money to her name and in desperate need of a job. After assuring Kristine that she can persuade her husband when needed, Nora reveals her biggest secret: she illegally took out a bank loan using her deceased father’s signature to save her husband’s life.

Unknowingly, Kristine ends up taking the job of Nils Krogstad, played by Baruch junior Sora Suzuki, who is revealed to be not only Kristine’s former lover, but also the person that Nora borrowed money from.

Nils immediately resorts to blackmail after losing his job. He not only holds Nora’s secret in his pocket, but also her husband’s. In Ibsen’s original play, Nils’s family background is barely explored, giving Scott the creative freedom to introduce an entirely new character: Karl Krogstad.

By the time the play begins, Karl is already dead, yet his name surfaces repeatedly in connection with Torvald. Everyone in the house truly has their own secrets and Torvald, the one who constantly speaks of secrets like poison, was no exception. 

Years prior to when the play took place, Torvald and Karl were in a romantic relationship. Torvald quickly hid the truth because society at the time would still deem the relationship “unnatural,” so he chalked it up to him being an old friend. The truth was slowly revealed as Nora kept desperately asking what her husband had to do with his death. The breakup between Karl and Torvald hurt Karl so much that he drove himself into a telephone pole while drunk. 

Nora spends the majority of the play trying to convince herself that everything she did was for love. Her husband, Torvald Helmer, played by Baruch senior Jesse Kabongo, is far from sharing that same sentiment. He stares his wife in the eyes and says, “No man sacrifices his honor for love.” Nora replies that millions of women have had to.

As the play continues, her supposed “for love” justification begins to make less sense as we see her play out an emotional affair with a dying man, Doctor Rank, played by Baruch alum Fredy Machado. 

Although she drinks in Dr. Rank’s attention, she masks it behind requests she claims she wants fulfilled by her husband. His character, even after his eventual death, serves as a symbol of the couple’s shallowness. Even after he dies, they each did little to mourn despite expressing his importance to the household.

Not only is Nora the doll of the house, but she is also the bird in Torvald’s cage. 

Throughout the play, he litters his speech with bird imagery: his “songbird” who must keep “a clean beak to sing with” and his “helpless little lark.” These metaphors become suffocatingly literal as Nora’s world collapses around her and she outgrows her cage. 

The audience watches Nora’s descent into mania and the moment she gets back on her feet and realizes she can, for the first time, use her wings to fly. Even with her name cleared, she does not want to be with her husband anymore, who wants to remain together for status. 

In an emotional speech, Nora declares that when she got married, ownership was simply passed from her father to her new husband. She was fed up with someone else controlling her in the house and realized that, before being a mother and a wife, she was a human being. Nora passionately says to her husband before she finally walks out the door, “You can’t educate me to be a wife again.”