Saturday night I went to see "Mabou Mines DollHouse" at the Freud Playhouse on the campus of UCLA.
Mabou Mines is an experimental theater company founded in New York City in 1970. They are well-known for their visually striking theatrical productions.
This show is adapted from Henrik Ibsen's classic "A Doll's House," where "frivolous" Nora comes home with a Christmas present -- a "dollhouse" so large the children can play inside.
What's visually astonishing about the Mabou Mines version is all the women in the cast are tall women (around 6 feet tall) and all the men in the cast are "little people" -- none taller than 4 feet, two inches.
The dollhouse and it's furniture are perfectly sized for the men in the cast, but the women must creep and crawl and squeeze throughout the set.
As the program says, "Here Ibsen's feminism is metaphorically rendered as a parable of scale. The 'dollhouse' is a man's world and only doll-like women who allow their men to feel grand can hope to live in it."
Talk about some images you'll never forget....
Sunday night I flew back up to San Francisco for a meeting on Monday.
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