Audience Expectations Through Light

Abstract

Our senior project GUNSHOT/DOORSLAM is an outside perspective of how classic plays treat women. We examine this through putting Henrik Ibsen’s protagonists from his seminal modern theatrical works, Hedda Gabler and A Doll’sHouse, Hedda Gabler and Nora Helmer, in a gay bar, where they share their experiences of ongoing destruction of their own classic female characters in the theatrical canon. The show has a second timeline where both Hedda and Nora get thrown into scenes from each other’s plays and try everything they can to stop a never-ending cycle of going between both the bar world and the world of Ibsen’s plays and re-living the trauma that each of the shows produce for these characters and what they go through every time. This timeline seeks to be a juxtaposition of what the characters freedom would look like if Hedda and Nora’s bonds were broken from Ibsen’s text.