Stephanie Gularte returns to the theater

Two years after she stepped away from making theater, Stephanie Gularte got an offer she couldn’t refuse.

The former producing artistic director at American Stage was contacted by Emilia Sargent, who sits in the big chair at Tampa Repertory Theatre, asking her to direct A Doll’s House, Part 2, playwright Lukas Hnath’s “sequel” to Ibsen’s classic drama A Doll’s House.

“She reached out to me before I was even ready to contemplate getting back into a rehearsal room,” Gularte says.

With a 2020 diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, Gularte had been forced to make specific changes in her life. Including saying goodbye to American Stage, where she’d help engineer an era of creative and commercial success.

“I had to make a decision that theater was no longer going to be my livelihood,” she recalls. “And I didn’t know in what way it would continue to be in my life – would it just be as a patron?”

Sargent and L. Peter Callender – estimable actors, as well as pals – were cast in the central roles of Nora and Thorvald Helmer. The deciding factor, Gularte says, was when Stageworks’ artistic director Karla Hartley, a longtime friend, joined the cast as Anne-Marie.

The cast of “A Doll’s House,” Part 2,” from left: Bria Matthews, Emilia Sargent, L. Peter Callender and Karla Hartley. Photo: Ned Averill-Snell.

Gularte had adapted and directed Ibsen works numerous times previously, and so the die was cast.

Change is a part of life, she knows. “You can resist it, or you can lean into it and look for where the opportunities are.”

A Doll’s House, Part 2 opens Friday in the Stageworks space, in Tampa’s Channelside district (there is a preview performance tonight). It picks up 15 years after Nora walked out on her husband, at the end of Ibsen’s play.

“We still struggle to understand, as much as ever, how to be together as humans,” Gularte observes. “And we can throw in all the other dimensions the play goes into, in terms of gender and marriage versus love, and freedom and individual rights and all of those things that are certainly integral to the relationship of Nora and Thorvald. And integral to the play.

“The play deals, essentially, with ‘How do we figure out how to be together as humans? Why is this so hard?’ And it creates this very honest explanation of this thing that is so relatable to all of us.”

Part 2, which had a successful Broadway run (with Laurie Metcalf and Chris Cooper as the troubled marrieds), is still set in Ibsen’s time period.

And although the somewhat stiff dialogue of the original has been subtly modernized, according to Gularte, it is by no means a “re-thinking” of the 19th century undercurrents that made A Doll’s House scandalous to period audiences.

“What Lukas is doing is speaking to an audience that is not unaccustomed to having ideas, values and social mores be challenged on the stage. That was not the case in Ibsen’s time. That’s what made his work so audacious. Audiences went to the theater to have their values upheld before them.

“So when he had Nora close that door at the end of that play, it was unheard of. Contemporary theater audiences are more accustomed to having ideas and values poked at, and understanding that that is one of the devices of theater.”

The contemporized speech, she adds is “is a really interesting juxtaposition – we see these characters in their late 19th century costumes, in a space that is “-ish” of the time period, but they speak in the way that we speak to one another.

Admittedly, that can be jarring to an audience weaned on the expansive melodramatics of Ibsen. “I think that’s intentional,” Gularte says, “but the ultimate impact is to bring us into the lives of these characters in a way that it’s harder to ‘other’ them. It’s harder to think ‘That’s how men behaved then’ or ‘That’s how men thought then.’”

She won’t go so far as to say “not much has changed” – that’s too simple an explanation – but she believes Stageworks audiences will recognize that some things, some attitudes, remain almost intact from earlier times.

And there is humor in the interactions of Part 2. “I firmly believe that humor is the way into truth, and if you can find the humor in the way that human beings behave, you can then start to relax and have a conversation that’s real.” Gularte adds that Ibsen’s play contains humor, but it’s often hard to distill from the 19th century dialogue.

A Doll’s House, Part 2 runs through Nov. 20.

“After this project I don’t have anything else lined up, but I’m not looking for something,” Gularte explains. “I feel really lucky and grateful that this worked out for where I am in my life. It was just the right fit.”

With more time on her hands, she has expanded the business she started five years ago, The Energy Advantage. She conducts leadership workshops and performs organizational consulting, coaching nonprofits and other groups.

“It’s centered around leadership and health and wellness, which are passions of mine, and areas that I’ve been exploring and studying for a long time,” she says.

Living in the here and now is turning out OK. “My life has gone on, and I’ve been busy, and it’s just that I’m not in a visible role any more,” she stresses. “And I am really good with that.”

Gularte admits to being something of an optimist. “I get pissed, and I feel sorry for myself sometimes. But I just don’t sit in that place for very long.”

Information and tickets are here.