Mother walks out on husband and youngster, after which …

Actors Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner have recognized one another since an opportunity assembly on the fringe of a softball discipline in Central Park within the late ’90s. She was at Juilliard, and he was in graduate faculty at New York College’s Tisch Faculty of the Arts. The pair stood by a fence watching their fellow college students play, having no intention of becoming a member of the sport themselves.

Harner remembers Reaser was a very potent mixture of humorous, irreverent, self-effacing and exquisite. As they chatted he thought, “Oh, this is gonna be fun!”

Greater than 20 years later, they’re working collectively for the primary time, enjoying estranged Victorian couple Nora and Torvald in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” opening Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse.

Director Jennifer Chang toyed with the thought of casting an precise married couple within the roles, however as soon as she witnessed the chemistry between Reaser and Harner, she knew she had made the proper alternative. It could sound counterintuitive — as a result of the play is a drama tackling themes of sophistication, feminism and parental and filial obligations — however Reaser and Harner’s superpower is their potential to snigger collectively.

“It’s fun to work with Jason because he’s hysterically funny, and I’m a whore for anyone who’s funny,” Reaser says with a large smile. “You could be the meanest person on the planet, but if you’re funny, I don’t care. This is my failing as a human being.”

Actors Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner are co-leads in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” on the Pasadena Playhouse.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Occasions)

Reaser’s snigger erupts with out warning, large and loud like a thunderclap; Harner’s is equally boisterous. Throughout a current morning rehearsal the 2 laughed usually and the end result was infectious. There was a lightness to the proceedings that belied the seriousness of the problems arising as they practiced the play’s remaining scene.

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” picks up 15 years after the occasions of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 traditional. Ibsen’s revolutionary script ends with the spouse, Nora, strolling out on her husband, Torvald, and their daughter as a way to uncover her full potential as a human being. Hnath’s sequel begins with Nora’s return. The viewers learns what she’s been as much as all these years, and likewise what she plans to do now.

The razor-sharp dialogue is rapid-fire, and correct supply requires a eager understanding of the character and nuance of language. Reaser and Harner have the traces principally down pat. What they’re engaged on throughout this specific rehearsal is the trivia of the blocking. Detailed discussions unfold with Chang about an overturned chair, the position of a booklet onstage, and when and the way Nora grabs her purse off a aspect desk by the door.

After an intense back-and-forth between the couple whereas they’re seated on the ground, Chang asks Harner, “Should you help her up?”

“I thought about it, but then I thought she wouldn’t like that,” Harner says of Nora, who could be very a lot her personal lady at this level.

She is, nevertheless, going to be carrying uncomfortable sneakers, a big skirt and a corset, Chang affords.

“Maybe we can make a moment of it?” she provides.

Harner considers this, twisting the hair behind his proper ear along with his proper hand as he talks. They talk about the that means behind Nora’s phrases at that individual beat within the script — and their impression on Torvald. Ultimately it’s determined that Harner will supply her his hand, and she’s going to hesitantly take it. They observe the scene time and again — every time with a unique impact. It’s a grasp class within the specificity of performing for the stage.

Harner revels on this work, having began his profession onstage earlier than reaching success as a display screen actor — most notably as FBI Particular Agent Roy Petty in “Ozark,” in addition to in “Fringe,” “The Walking Dead” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“I literally could start crying right now, because I miss the theater so much,” Harner says throughout an interview in Pasadena Playhouse’s cozy subterranean greenroom. “It’s important to me. I feel like I’m a better actor when I work onstage.”

Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner, who star as Nora and Torvald in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Occasions)

Reaser has an equally spectacular display screen résumé, together with the “Twilight” movies in addition to “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Good Wife” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” Her stage expertise isn’t as deep as Harner’s, and for the longest time she thought she couldn’t presumably do one other play, calling the method “too psychotic.” Nonetheless, she just lately advised her husband that she thought she was prepared and that she’d significantly prefer to work at Pasadena Playhouse.

Three months later she received “this random call out of nowhere.” It was meant to be.

Harner quickly texted her, writing cheekily, “We’re too young, right?”

Reaser didn’t know Harner had been forged as Torvald.

“I was like, ‘Well, who’s playing the Nora?’ Because if you don’t have a good Nora, I don’t want to do it,” Harner says.

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” opened on Broadway in 2017, notes Chang — earlier than a world pandemic, the Supreme Courtroom’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the start of President Trump’s second time period. In some methods, she says, the play is extra related than ever.

“Reading it now, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is not the play that I remembered,’” she says, including that context is every little thing on the subject of interacting with artwork. “I’m probably not the person now that I was then.”

Reaser and Harner are equally primed to ship the present within the context of regional Los Angeles theater in 2025.

“The original play is still revolutionary,” says Reaser. “The idea of leaving your children is still a shocking, radical thing.”

What Hnath did in selecting up and reexamining this supply materials, Harner says, was a outstanding act of harnessing that complexity.

“It’s about patriarchy and misogyny, and obviously, primarily, about a woman discovering her voice,” he says. “But it’s also about two people — a couple — who, in one version of themselves, really did love each other.”

‘A Doll’s Home, Half 2’

The place: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S El Molino Ave.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays; 7 p.m. Thursdays; 2 and eight p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays and seven p.m. Sunday June 1; ends June 8. Test with field workplace for finest availability.

Tickets: Onstage seating begin at $30 on TodayTix; common seating begins at $40 on PasadenaPlayhouse.org

Info: (626) 356-7529 or PasadenaPlayhouse.org

Operating time: 1 hour, half-hour (no intermission)