‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ at Pasadena Playhouse: A woman walks out on her husband and children, and then ...

Mom walks out on husband and children, and then ...

Actors Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner have known each other since a chance meeting at the edge of a softball field in Central Park in the late ’90s. She was at Juilliard, and he was in graduate school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The pair stood by a fence watching their fellow students play, having no intention of joining the game themselves.

Harner recalls Reaser was a particularly potent combination of funny, irreverent, self-effacing and beautiful. As they chatted he thought, “Oh, this is gonna be fun!”

More than two decades later, they are working together for the first time, playing 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 idea of casting an actual married couple in the roles, but once she witnessed the chemistry between Reaser and Harner, she knew she had made the correct choice. It may sound counterintuitive — because the play is a drama tackling themes of class, feminism and parental and filial obligations — but Reaser and Harner’s superpower is their ability to laugh together.

“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 wide 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” at the Pasadena Playhouse.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Reaser’s laugh erupts without warning, big and loud like a thunderclap; Harner’s is equally boisterous. During a recent morning rehearsal the two laughed often and the result was infectious. There was a lightness to the proceedings that belied the seriousness of the issues arising as they practiced the play’s final scene.

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” picks up 15 years after the events of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic. Ibsen’s revolutionary script ends with the wife, Nora, walking out on her husband, Torvald, and their children in order to discover her full potential as a human being. Hnath’s sequel begins with Nora’s return. The audience learns what she’s been up to all those years, and also what she plans to do now.

The razor-sharp dialogue is rapid-fire, and proper delivery requires a keen understanding of the nature and nuance of language. Reaser and Harner have the lines mostly down pat. What they are working on during this particular rehearsal is the minutiae of the blocking. Detailed discussions unfold with Chang about an overturned chair, the placement of a booklet onstage, and when and how Nora grabs her purse off a side table by the door.

After an intense back-and-forth between the couple while they are seated on the floor, 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 is very much her own woman at this point.

She is, however, going to be wearing uncomfortable shoes, a large skirt and a corset, Chang offers.

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

Harner considers this, twisting the hair behind his right ear with his right hand as he talks. They discuss the meaning behind Nora’s words at that particular beat in the script — and their impact on Torvald. Eventually it is decided that Harner will offer her his hand, and she will hesitantly take it. They practice the scene over and over again — each time with a different effect. It’s a master class in the specificity of acting for the stage.

Harner revels in this work, having started his career onstage before achieving success as a screen actor — most notably as FBI Special Agent Roy Petty in “Ozark,” as well as 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 during 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 Times)

Reaser has an equally impressive screen résumé, including the “Twilight” films as well as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Good Wife” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” Her stage experience is not as deep as Harner’s, and for the longest time she thought she couldn’t possibly do another play, calling the process “too psychotic.” Nonetheless, she recently told her husband that she thought she was ready and that she’d particularly like to work at Pasadena Playhouse.

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

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

Reaser didn’t know Harner had been cast 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 — before a global pandemic, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the beginning of President Trump’s second term. In some ways, she says, the play is more relevant than ever.

“Reading it now, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is not the play that I remembered,’” she says, adding that context is everything when it comes to interacting with art. “I’m probably not the person now that I was then.”

Reaser and Harner are similarly primed to deliver the show in 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 picking up and reexamining this source material, Harner says, was a remarkable 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.”