A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
|April 8th - May 7th 2016|              Adapted by Frank McGuinness
Directed by Samantha Van Der Merwe

*Winner- Best Supporting Actress- Jamie Rea

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Starring: Madelyn Clement, Jacob Coleman, Matthew Kerrigan+, Jody McCoy, Ben Newman*, Daeja Paschoal-Thiem, Jamie Rea, Will Sievertsen, Jake Turner, Nikki Weaver*, Celia Wood, & Max Young, 

Creative Team: Jenny Ampersand, Marc Anderson, Katy Calder, Griffin Dewitt, Rebecca Foster, Jonathan Hernandez, Alanna Hylton, Ryan Mooney, Lydia Petersons, Jake Turner, Samantha Van Der Merwe, & Kathleen Worley 

*Member of Actors Equity Association
+Member of Shaking The Tree Performance Group

​Nora Helmer is a vibrant young housewife who nonetheless suffers from a crippling dependency on her husband of eight years. He, Torvald, has always done the thinking for the both of them. In order to save Torvald from a debt, and to spare his masculine pride, Nora arranges a loan without his knowledge, and does so by forging a signature. The inevitable revelation of the crime results in an unexpected reaction from Torvald: Rather than being grateful to Nora, he is incapable of accepting the pride and self-sufficiency she demonstrated in taking care of him, and he accuses her of damaging his good name. The illusions behind their marriage are exposed, and Nora wakes to feelings of self awareness for the first time in her life. Torvald is not the man she thought she knew. They are husband and wife, yes, but they are strangers as well. And in one of the most famous, and scandalous, climaxes in all of nineteenth-century drama, Nora leaves her husband and children, determined to forge a new identity from the one she has always known.

A Doll's House is sponsored by: 

Ronni Lacroute- WillaKenzie Estate

Photos by Gary Norman

Reviews

"From now until May 7, you could sit around and wait for something glorious to happen. Or you could go see A DOLL'S HOUSE at Shaking the Tree and guarantee that it does."
-Krista Garver, Broadway World
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"The set in Shaking the Tree's warehouse space is literally built around the audience, so audiences will connect to these characters and this story in a way they might not had the stories taken place on an elevated stage in a more standard theater.
And Shaking the Tree gets it right here: The setting, this home, is such an integral part of this story – as much as nearly any of the characters – so audiences should experience it and interact with it like they do here..." - DeAnn Welker, Oregonlive
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"Samantha Van Der Merwe's immersive set design is often worth the price of admission alone, and her latest production, which adapts the Henrik Ibsen classic A Doll's House, is no exception. The tiny warehouse space is divided into neat domestic quadrants, each with its own color scheme and lighting, separated by translucent screening—it's like looking into the cutaway rooms of an overgrown dollhouse, which is exactly the point." - Megan Burbank, Portland Mercury
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"Shaking the Tree opens its own door to the secrets of Ibsen’s house. The Portland theater company likes to play, right from the beginning of its handsome and lively new production of his 1879 masterwork: we enter the theater, and are in the dollhouse." - Christa Morletti McIntyre, Artswatch
​READ MORE HERE

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