Certain plays, love ’em or hate ’em, are useful in the same way standards make a great playground for singers and jazz musicians. A play that everyone knows—or at least knows something about—can be a framework, a jumping-off point for all kinds of imaginative interpretations. The late-19th century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen has given us two works in particular that actors and directors love to revisit: both A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler are stories of unruly women, characters who take decisive action without courting masculine approval. Nora, of A Doll’s House, is a wife and mother who walks out on her family, society be damned. The title character of Hedda Gabler is a bored, unhappily married aristocrat who toys with the fates of those around her as a way of seizing some

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