There are three things you can count on theater audiences liking in 2019: husbands and wives bickering, elderly women in long dresses talking potty-mouth, and, if it's a Steppenwolf audience, anything uttered by company member Yasen Peyankov. These reliable motifs, when coupled with an A-List ethnically-diverse cast and a trendy stage picture featuring spectators seated in full view of the audience, makes it all too easy to mistake Lucas Hnath's sequel to Henrik Ibsen's groundbreaking social commentary on marital discord for a pilot episode of a modern television sitcom. Listen closely, however, and you will discover Hnath—when not, himself, engaging in gratuitous flippancies—constructing an astonishingly mature and thorough debate on long-ignored side issues within this prototypal tale of a runaway wife. Among these are the proposition that Nora's flight was initiated, not as an exile, but as a separation, with reunion always within the realm of possibility. Abandoned husband Torvald, too, is capable of remorse at his ignorance leading to acknowledgment of his error. There is also the response of the other family members in this "broken home" (before the term became commonplace) and the introduction of a solution so obvious and reasonable that we are amazed that squabbling spouses a century ago didn't think of it.
