CLOSE LISTENING

Jessica Chastain stars in "A Doll's House."

- HELEN SHAW

For the long quarter-hour before "A Doll's House" begins, Jessica Chastain sits looking at the audience in the Hudson Theatre as people fill up the seats. She's in a plain dark dress on a plain wooden chair on a plain bleak stage. A turntable moves her in slow circles she looks like the last lonely dish left on a lazy Susan. The air throbs with dread-inducing electronic tones; the five other cast members enter and sit with their backs to her, not yet caught up in her sad merry-go-round. Whatever else Chastain's Nora will be, at least we know she has sufficient inner resources to keep herself company while staring through the fourth wall.

In the current Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 drama, adapted by Amy Herzog and directed by Jamie Lloyd, Nora has three children (present only as giggling voice-overs); a husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed); a nanny (Tasha Lawrence); a family friend, Dr. Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), who adores her; and an old friend, Kristine (Jesmille Darbouze), who wants to fix her. Nora also has a creditor turned blackmailer, Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan), who comes the closest to understanding her. On the surface, Nora is a dizzy, much-indulged wife, skilled at twining Torvald around her finger. That laughing manipulation, though, hides her big secret, a loan, from Krogstad, that she's been paying off. As the play begins, Nora seems almost in the clear-blue skies ahead! But the real thundercloud is her marriage: a perpetual (and still familiar) weather system of condescension, mutual untruth, and socially endorsed sexism.