Gordon Cox Theater Editor When Jessica Chastain explains how she and her collaborators created the standout moments in her Tony-nominated Broadway performance in “A Doll’s House,” one wouldn’t expect to hear her mention the Sam Raimi horror movie “Evil Dead.” Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: But that’s exactly what the Oscar-winning actor (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) did in the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast. “Evil Dead,” she explained, figured into her early thinking as she and director Jamie Lloyd were brainstorming how to stage her character Nora’s performance of a dance called the tarantella.
It’s one of the most famous sequences in Henrik Ibsen’s classic play — and when Chastain performs it, she never rises from the chair in which she sits for almost the entirety of the play.
In the overall production, Chastain is confined to the chair as a physical echo of the constrictions placed on Nora as a wife and mother in a patriarchal society.
In trying to imagine what Nora’s dance might look like, Chastain said she asked Lloyd, “What if she’s completely out of control and her body’s taking over and she doesn’t want it to happen? “I even said, ‘This is not how I’m going to play it, but do you know that movie ‘Evil Dead’ with the actor Bruce Campbell, and his arm becomes possessed and tries to kill him?
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