What secrets lurk behind the prim facades of Parisian apartment buildings?  An outsider is hard-pressed to know. Their massive wooden doors are shut tight like pursed lips, their shutters drawn closed in a gesture of perpetual discretion.  But their silence speaks volumes, and their outward respectability seems to trumpet hidden scandal. Walking along the streets at night, a passerby can’t help but look up at the faintly illuminated windows of one of these cut-stone palaces and wonder who’s having an affair with which servant, and in which closet the skeletons are hidden. For those who want to have a look inside this discrete world without risking a charge of breaking and entering, a cycle of two plays by Henrik Ibsen at Théâtre de la Colline offers a good point of departure. Director Stéphane Braunschweig has taken two masterworks of Scandinavian angst – “Rosmersholm” and “A Doll’s House” – and set them in what resembles a sinister upper-class Parisian apartment. His characters live in a birdcage of gray walls, cream-colored duvet covers and white floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – a world where families might disintegrate or be ruined, but no one would even think about spilling a glass of red wine on the spotless couch. 

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