Playing (with) Gestic Dolls in Mabou Mines DollHouse

Abstract

The 2003 production by Mabou Mines, co-created by avant-garde theatre artists Lee Breuer and Maud Mitchell, is one such revolutionary re-imagining of Ibsen’s A Doll House that critiques patriarchal power inherent in the system of commodity consumption in today’s society. Emphasizing the doll as an object of consumption and a powerful performative motif, Mabou Mines DollHouse adapts Ibsen’s work and re-captures the “shock effect” of the original through visual contrast...Breuer and Mitchell’s production makes specific use of Brechtian theatre techniques of historicization, estrangement and gestus on the one hand to deconstruct commodified objects, specifically, the doll as a tool of patriarchy to limit a woman’s agency, and, on the other, to perform them with new, subversive understandings.