David Mirvish in a co-production with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre presents A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 by Lucas Hnath. Starring four outstanding Canadian actors and directed by Krista Jackson, this brilliant and audacious play is performed March 23 to April 14, 2019 at Toronto’s CAA Theatre as part of the Off-Mirvish Season. 

In the final scene of Ibsen’s 1879 groundbreaking masterwork, A Doll’s House, Nora makes the shocking decision to leave her husband and children, and begin a new life on her own. This climactic event—when Nora abandons everything in her life; “the door slam heard round the world” as it’s come to be known — instantly propelled world drama into the modern age. It also began the discussion in earnest of women’s rights in Western society.

As Lucas Hnath proposes in A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2, fifteen years have passed since Nora’s exit. Now, there’s a knock on that same door. Nora has returned. But why? And what will it mean for those she left behind — her husband, her three children and the maid who raised her and who is now rising Nora’s children?

More importantly, has anything really changed in society since Ibsen first wrote about these issues in 1879? Have women been given the equal rights they’ve always deserved? Has the institution of marriage improved for both partners? Or do women still live in doll houses?

Playwright Lucas Hnath says about his play:

"All of the things that were debated and negotiated in Ibsen’s play are still topics that are debated and negotiated now. So one of the first ideas that I had about A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 is it’s a play about how much we’ve changed, and how much we haven’t, in terms of thinking about equality between men and women.

I was reading a lot of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote The Yellow Wallpaper while working on the play. She wrote a great deal of feminist theory and she had a really interesting line saying, when you hear a school teacher, nurse, secretary — she listed a bunch of occupations — the first thing that anybody imagines is a woman. She goes on to say that she’s looking forward to the day when you can say one of those titles and a woman is not the first image that pops into the mind. She’s thinking about certain limitations in terms of how women are perceived.

At a certain point, I brought the play in conversation with a number of feminist scholars and asked them to take a look at the play and counter-argue anything that gets said in it. One of the questions I asked at one point was, “It was shocking for Nora to leave her children at the end of A Doll’s House, but if it were written now, what would be the shocking ending?” The response was, “Well that’s still the shocking ending! That’s still something that is unthinkable.” That was actually very helpful to hear. I think I had gotten quite numb to the shock. And there were a lot of arguments in my play that some of the scholars thought would actually give whatever critique they had of Nora’s argument to Anne-Marie and it made the debate better."

A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 premiered in Costa Mesa, California, in 2016. It had its Broadway debut in 2017, winning unanimous praise from critics and audiences, and nominated for seven Tony Awards.

"A smart, funny and utterly engrossing play,” said The New York Times. “It delivers explosive laughs while also posing thoughtful questions about marriage, inequality and human rights,” added The Hollywood Reporter. The Los Angeles Times named it “the best play of the year,” and Time Out said, “It’s dynamite. It keeps you hanging on each turn of argument and twist of knife.”

A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 
March 23 to April 14, 2019 The CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge St., Toronto
Performances Tuesday to Saturday 8 PM; matinees Wednesday 1:30 PM, Saturday & Sunday 2 PM (No Wednesday matinee on March 27)
The show is 90 minutes in length, with no intermission.

Tickets $39 to $99 • Students $25 with valid ID

Online www.mirvish.com

By Phone 416-872-1212 or 1-800-461-3333 

Groups of 10 or more 416-593-4142 or 1-800-724-6420 

 ###Please note mirvish.com and TicketKing are the official and only sources of tickets to all shows playing at any of the Mirvish theatres. Beware of websites that pretend to have tickets to our shows. These are re-sellers attempting to trick unsuspecting theatregoers using search engines to find tickets to a show into purchasing tickets that may very well be fraudulent.