Rabe’s Nora makes this her ‘Doll’s House’

That makes it sound faintly absurd when the condescending Torvald (Josh Hamilton) repeatedly refers to her as his “songbird’’ and “skylark’’ and “dove,’’ because this Nora neither flutters nor warbles.

An imposing presence in high heels, speaking in a resonant voice that often has a sardonic edge to it, Rabe’s Nora always seems as if she would be more than a match for Torvald when the chips are down - as, of course, they eventually are.

That’s not to say that Torvald does not do his utmost to maintain his control over Nora. In the WTF production, ably directed by Sam Gold as part portrait of a disintegrating marriage, part power struggle, the ugliness that ensues is not only verbal. At one point, Torvald seizes Nora by the throat; she fiercely pushes him away. During their climactic confrontation at the play’s end, he shoves her. But Nora, of course, has one final surprise up her sleeve.

Rabe’s performance is so electric and generates such a force field around her that the play’s energy level dips noticeably whenever she is offstage, which, fortunately, is not often.

Nora often seems ready to jump out of her own skin, in the grip of a restlessness that is not entirely explained even by her increasingly dire circumstances, that seems to come from within. When Torvald instructs his wife to rehearse the tarantella for a performance at a party, Rabe packs such wild desperation into the dance that she threatens to tear apart the Helmers’ living room.

Even in a translation (by Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama) that includes such up-to-date lingo as “balloon payment,’’ there is a stilted quality to some of the exchanges. Yes, Ibsen is justly renowned for his modernity, but there remains a 19th-century European formality to his dialogue that coexists uneasily with the contemporary setting of the WTF production, inspired by present-day Brooklyn, N.Y.