'Noura' Revisits 'A Doll's House' From A Modern And Multicultural Perspective

Speaker 1: 00:00 Old globe, USD Shailee, master of fine arts program graduate. Heather Raphoe is having the West coast premiere of her plate. Nora at the Globes intimate theater in the round. She is the daughter of an Iraqi father and an American mother. Her play is inspired by Ibsen's a doll house and an earlier Nora KPBS arts reporter Beth Hawk. Amando attended the first tech rehearsal last week to get this preview. Speaker 2: 00:26 Heather, to begin with, explain a little bit about what your play Nora is about and what the inspiration was. It's about a marriage. It's about motherhood and it's about the balance between individual pursuits and community pursuits and I think that very much happens as a mother in a family. The inspiration came from primarily I was leading theater workshops in New York where I'm living with women in a middle Eastern community and we ended up reading adults house after a few years of working with them on their own narratives. And so this play kind of picks up as a pushback to that very famous Ibsen story. The reason why it's a, it's a pushback is that so many of the women I was working with had already left home in that kind of massive door slam heard around the world way. A lot of them were refugees, a lot of them had fled countries. Speaker 2: 01:33 And I was interested in looking at an entire family that had already lived that both the men and the women in the family and how they are life in America, how they view it here, how they try to hold onto what they left behind and how they try to move forward. Tell us a little bit about your background, your personal background and how that played into this. So my father was born in Iraq and my mother is American. My dad's American now too. Um, so I would say since I was 20 I've been kind of bridging both of those cultures and both of those worlds. And I have watched friends and family members and lots of people that have come to America from Iraq view their identity in a very personal and different way. So people in the play, some of them feel like they've come here and absolutely adopted American lifestyle and others haven't. Speaker 2: 02:30 And there's a lot of conflict between who feels what when and how you do all that in one family and you've tackled issues of this before in plays. How did you want to deal with those issues in this play differently from how you had in the past? Well my first play very much dealt with Iraq. He's still living in Iraq and this play is absolutely about a family that is now American. And I think that what they're trying to embrace, as I said before, is the pole between community and individualism. And America is really based on rugged individualism that offers a lot of things. But when people come from communities and countries that the whole entire social fabric is about togetherness. Taking those kind of individual steps is a push pull. And I think that we're dealing with the, all Americans are dealing with that right now. Speaker 2: 03:29 We're, we're seeing what happens when we have only an individualistic approach and how much more we need to root in community. So it's both. I mean the Nora Helmer of a doll's house wakes up to her individualism. Right. And that's been prized as this beacon of feminist literature in the theater. And I, and I, I don't know what I, I F I feel about that. I kind of roll my eyes and sad. I don't know if, if I believe that's the exact approach. There's a whole way of thinking an Arab feminism that deals much more with community and how you move forward as a group rather than purely as an individual though this production is being done in the round. How do you think the play works in that kind of setting? Is it, uh, lend itself to that? Absolutely. Yes. It absolutely lends itself to working in the round nor as an architect and everything about what she's doing, visioning to build both in her personal space and in the house she's imagining for her family is about what walls are keeping her and protecting her and what walls she is pushing away. Speaker 2: 04:38 So when the audience and people themselves are walls, that very much plays into how the gays and the pressure of society is looking in on her and how they're embracing her. It works really well on a Tulsa, very intimate obviously, which always works for apply. And what was most challenging about putting this play together and conveying the ideas you wanted to get across? There are two things that I found very challenging and they're both gender related and one was that we want our lead female characters to be sympathetic always. And that tends to mean they can't be strong and difficult. They can be strong, but they, if they're sympathetic, they can't always be difficult in and York can be very difficult. I found it interesting that audiences really wanted to come feel very bad for this refugee family. They wanted to feel bad and love them and want to help them in all these ways and she doesn't want pity. Speaker 2: 05:44 So that was very interesting to see how audiences reacted to a woman who didn't want to be sympathetic. Um, the other thing I thought was challenging was that the husband has lived through as much as Nora and he's a really dear and loving guy and he says one kind of mean thing. Yeah. And I think that the fact that the husband says this one line is, is meant to lead an audience to realize that things get set in a marriage and people move past it. But I, I did find that a lot of people wanted to feed into the stereotype and say that that one line colors colors all men or colors middle Eastern men in this particular way. And I, I think that those were the challenges that I'm still kind of tinkering with. And what the, um, is it in the playing of it? Speaker 2: 06:36 Is it in the text? How does, how does one allow an audience to see these issues as a way more complex rather than more stereotypical? Heather, you are one of the Globes, MFA graduates. What does that mean? What did that program do for you? Well, it did, I mean it obviously did a lot for me. It was the training that we all use to start our careers. Um, but I think one of the most profound things that it did for me was it coupled a deep love of classical and Shakespeare training while pushing us in our thesis moment to write new work. So bridging the new American theater with, you know, the classics is a lot of what Nora came out of [inaudible]. And tell us a little more about Nora's character. You said she's an architect and what else distinguishes her? The biggest thing that really distinguishes her as is this lack of being, needing to be sympathetic. There's so many ways women are hoping to express their opinion and they couch them in ways that make them palatable, right? They play small or they play kind or they play nice in order to say the thing they came to say. And she is discovering through the course of the play that that didn't serve her and that the thing she lost, she probably lost because she did that. Heather Rafa's play. Nora runs through October 20th at the Globes, Cheryl and Harvey white theater.