I’ve had two thoughts as I read your post. First, a possible playwriting project for you to consider: re-writing A Doll’s House completely from the perspective of Helene. There are many examples of this kind of shifting perspective with the characters from a well-known play or novel: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard) and Fortinbras (Lee Blessing) both tweak Hamlet; Ahab’s Wife by Sena Naslund builds an entire novel around a character that gets about a paragraph’s worth of mention in Melville’s Moby Dick. David Jays actually mused about this shift in a 2008 blog for The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/apr/28/rosencrantz-guildenstern, and notes “To apportion stage attention is to declare what interests you.” Jays finds that Chekhov appoints his minor characters with eccentricities that give them a great potential for driving a work of their own. I’m not sure Ibsen has been as generous, but you have certainly filled in these blanks with great thought.

Which leads me to my second idea. If you were to write these three days in the Helmer household from Helene’s perspective, I wonder how her invisibility, her lack of being watched (in contrast to Nora’s position as object), would effect the telling of the story. Would it work for us to see through her eyes (perhaps literally if you were to think of it as a film, where the camera’s eye is Helene’s eye) hear through her ears? Or should we see her from the outside, following her on her errands, hearing her gossip, experiencing her entrances and exits. *Upstairs, Downstairs* seems to split the difference (though all from an ‘outside’ eye perspective) by showing us the places in the house open to the ‘public’ and the places in the house that aren’t meant to be seen at least not by someone who is not a servant. The more I think of it, I really like the idea of seeing *from* Helene’s perspective versus just being allow to see her in a different context. That POV would work differently in the theater than a film (and films that attempt it can seem gimmicky, like the film noir The Lady in the Lake (1945); The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) where the protagonist has been bedridden by a stroke, was more successful). For the theater it might take the form of a solo show. Maybe with an entire Doll’s House set turned out of the audience’s site, and the ‘backstage’ of the house — Helene’s domain — becoming the mainstage.

Funny, when I was little I never had the impulse to take apart machines to see their insides and how they work, but I love getting into the guts of plays and, as you can see, consider remaking them to see what new things they might do!