Jessica Chastain is at the center of “A Doll’s House” from the moment you enter the Hudson Theatre, where director Jamie Lloyd’s radically stripped-down Henrik Ibsen revival opened Thursday. She’s seated at a simple wooden chair that spins on the turntable stage on a set that is similarly sparse save for a strip of white paint along the bottom of the theater’s back wall (which proves useful for lighting designer Jon Clark to cast shadows). As the play begins, she is still seated — and remains so for virtually the entire two-hour intermissionless running time (even when she practices her dance for a holiday party).

Chastain, with her brittle doll-like face, delivers a Nora whose evolution from delicate, dutiful housewife to marriage-rejecting feminist rebel seems like a plausible outgrowth of her particular circumstances. The Oscar winner uses that porcelain-pure face to great effect here, in part because she has little else to fall back upon. There are no costumes or elaborate sets to show us the bourgeois comforts she’s giving up by leaving her priggish banker husband (Arian Moayed, “Succession”). Her children have been reduced to offstage voices. Even basic physical action has been jettisoned, so that one character talks of lighting another’s (unseen) cigar while standing stock still, with arms at the vertical. (The staging seems ripe for parody by the “Forbidden Broadway” team.)

What we get is a kind of Spotify version of “A Doll’s House,” with line readings so deliberately understated that they would not be out of place on the audio service’s ASMR playlist. Until Nora’s final scene Moayed’s Torvald, nobody raises their voice much above a whisper — a disquieting choice that heightens the sense of threat and gathering doom. As Korgstad, the fired bank clerk who blackmails Nora over a fraudulently obtained loan, Okieriete Onaodowan (“Hamilton”) seems less like a desperate schemer than a Mob boss of few but carefully selected words. Other supporting players, including Jesmille Darbouze (“Betrayal”) as Nora’s childhood friend Kristine and Michael Patrick Thornton as their doting but terminally ill friend Dr. Rank, bring a similar restraint to their performances.

Amy Herzog’s streamlined adaptation of Ibsen’s original play also amplifies the effect, stripping away any hint of melodrama while studding the dialogue with anachronistically modern turns of phrase that occasionally trigger chuckles from the audience.

Despite the affectations, Chastain manages to win us over. She projects both fragility (she’s reduced to tears so often that one worries that her headset mic might short itself out) as well as a steeliness borne from finding ways to get things done despite her narrowed circumstances as a woman in 1879 Denmark.

And Lloyd’s direction is far more effective here than his similarly stripped down Harold Pinter revival “Betrayal” four years ago — but perhaps not for an auditorium as big as the Hudson. Without sets or costumes or traditional blocking, we are left only with the flashes of emotion coming from Chastain’s versatile, hard-working face. But hers is a performance best experienced in close-up — one that may not be as easily appreciated in the mezzanine or balcony sections. More troublingly, Lloyd’s biggest staging gambit is a surprise coup de theatre at the very end of the play that occurs so far upstage right that anyone seated in the left third of the auditorium will miss it entirely. It’s a pity — even those paying top dollar for a Broadway ticket may miss the best of what this “Doll’s House” has to offer.

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