Whistlin' Trixie

What do you have to complain about? I wish I could sit around in my pajamas and write all day."

Rebecca Gilman isn't quoting a green-eyed fellow scribe. She's explaining that, although her play The Sweetest Swing in Baseball was "an appeal to people to understand the difficulties of the creative process," it also accounted for less-than-sympathetic reactions to the tortured artist. When Sweetest Swing premiered in London last year, viewers raised an eyebrow at the story of an on-the-rise artist buckling under the pressures. "It's not a road map of an emotional journey that I personally went through," Gilman says, but adds, "It's disingenuous to say there's nothing of me in the play." (Chicagoans will get their chance to see it next spring, when Eclipse Theatre Company devotes its season to Gilman.)

Chicago-based Gilman, who's had several works staged in London, notes the differences between the Brit and Yank theater worlds by pointing to the more positive British reception of her breakthrough play, The Glory of Living, in which a trailer-park teenager kills the women her husband rapes. "I think the subject matter is a bit off-putting to people, and [in Britain] they don't care. I just don't think there's a sense of what is or isn't appropriate for the theater over there like there is over here."

For her latest project, Gilman is back on home turf. She's adapted Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (and shortened the title to Dollhouse), setting Nora Helmer's stand against her infantilizing marriage in present-day Lincoln Park. Like Nora, Gilman's female protagonists struggle against structures not entirely of their own choosing, and like Ibsen's heroine, Gilman's women tend to leave. In Spinning Into Butter, Gilman's most often-produced work, a liberal white college dean is forced to reckon with her own racism, then quits her job. Boy Gets Girl looks at a woman stalked by a man she blind-dated—she's compelled to leave her apartment and flee.

So when Robert Falls, Goodman Theatre's artistic director, suggested that Gilman adapt Ibsen's play, it was "not just a coincidence," Gilman says. "Bob knows me really well, and he knows the sort of things I'm interested in." A native Alabaman (the Southern lilt comes through faintly), Gilman moved to Chicago after getting an M.F.A. in playwriting at the University of Iowa. She had the distinctly unglamorous job of writing standardized tests for an educational publisher. About five years ago, she started writing full time.

For this adaptation, Gilman had to bring some elements up-to-date. In the original, Nora furtively borrows money so that her ailing husband can have a desperately needed holiday in a warmer climate. When he finds out about the loan (an illegal act for a woman at that time), he turns against her. Nora takes stock of her sham marriage, then bolts. Clearly, the illegality of Nora's loan is an anachronism, so Gilman met with people from Bank One to find a present-day equivalent. Yet even with a contemporary flavor, how relevant is a play about a woman completely bound by her husband's dictates?

"That was a question I asked myself. 'Is this play still pertinent?' We all want to think that Nora's journey in 1879 has been fulfilled at this point, but [Falls and I] realized that while Nora has gone a long way, she still has a ways to go, if you want to think of Nora as emblematic of the women's movement."

But Gilman thinks the play is less about feminism, more about bourgeois values. "It's amazing, the amount of discussion of money, and what they spend it on and where it's going and where it comes from," she says. "That, to me, feels very modern, because everybody right now is freaked out about money because everybody's living on credit. The Helmers are really a modern couple in that sense."

As a self-professed feminist writer updating Ibsen's proto-feminist play, Gilman finds that, "Sadly, people don't want to say they're feminists anymore because [they] equate it with stridency or humorlessness." So what does it mean to be a feminist writer? "I think it means, for me personally, I try to write strong female characters. I try to look at the ways gender norms are culturally created for men and women. It may just be as simple as that."

Dollhouse is playing at the Goodman Theatre. Resident companies.